A landfill fire started in 1962. More than 60 years later, it’s still burning underground
In a near-deserted borough in Pennsylvania, a fire has been raging beneath the ground for just over six decades.
A borough in Pennsylvania has descended into near ghost-town status since the second half of the 20th century, as a decades-long fire continues to rage in abandoned coal mines beneath the ground.
As of 2025, there were just a handful of remaining residents in Centralia, a one-time key mining town in the U.S. state’s central Columbus County. Since 2002, indeed, the borough has not even been given a zip code.
When did the Centralia Mine Fire start?
Centralia had some 1,200 residents when the fire started, back in May 1962. But in the years since, efforts to snuff out the below-the-surface blaze have failed, and the borough has become a place where the ground can collapse without warning, and where all manner of noxious gases are belched out from below.
In a Smithsonian Magazine report on Centralia, a section of the borough’s hellish landscape is described in vivid, arresting terms. “Vegetation has been obliterated along a quarter-mile strip,” writes Kevin Krajik. “Sulfurous steam billows out of hundreds of fissures and holes in the mud. There are pits extending perhaps 20 feet down: in their depths, discarded plastic bottles and tires have melted. Dead trees, their trunks bleached white, lie in tangled heaps, stumps venting smoke through hollow centers.”
Two decades after the Centralia Mine Fire began, authorities began to relocate residents and demolish many of the borough’s condemned structures. However, a few residents remain, having stubbornly refused to leave.
How did the Centralia Mine Fire start?
By 1962, Centralia was already a mining town on the decline. Founded in the mid-19th century, the borough had reaped the benefits of its healthy anthracite deposits, growing to a population of over 2,000 by around the turn of the 20th century. From its 1920s high, however, employment in the U.S. coal industry dropped steadily. By 1962, most of Centralia’s major mining activities had stopped.
“The mine fire was a sudden and dramatic disaster piled onto the advancing economic disaster throughout the region,” Jon Guss recalls in a 2007 article for the Pennsylvania Center for the Book.
There are multiple theories about how the fire was ignited 64 years ago. But the most commonly held conclusion, says the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is that it began when trash-burning efforts at a nearby waste-disposal area went wrong. From there, the fire then spread to abandoned mines that had not been properly sealed off.
“The most widely accepted ignition scenario is that the fire was intentionally set by Borough personnel,” the Commonwealth says. “The fire may have been deliberately ignited to reduce the volume of trash, to reduce public health vectors and to reduce odors in preparation for visitors to the nearby cemetery before the Memorial Day Holiday.”
Guss adds: “While regulations required that all entrances into closed mines be filled with incombustible material, one fifteen foot hole was not previously noticed and had been left open. The extensive, interconnected mining tunnels beneath Centralia, still rich with anthracite, provided an ideal environment for a mine fire and enabled its rapid spread.”
Efforts to douse the fire with water and cover it with clay both failed, amid an apparently sluggish initial attempt to combat the inferno.
“It was awful scary”
Over the next two decades, as the flames continued to thrive, Centralia’s population remained around the 1,000 mark. But after a near tragedy hit national headlines at the start of the 80s, the U.S. Congress approved a $42 million, borough-wide relocation effort.
In 1981, a 12-year-old boy, Todd Dombowski, had a narrow escape when a large sink hole suddenly opened up in his grandmother’s yard, very nearly sucking him under. “It was awful scary,” Dombowski said, per a New York Times report from the time. “I just grabbed some roots and hung there; the smoke was so thick I couldn’t see anything,”
Yet even experiences such as Dombowski’s could not persuade every Centralian to up sticks. In 2013, after a years-long legal battle, eight residents finally beat the state government’s attempts to remove them. A ruling by the U.S. District Court secured their right to carry on living in the borough until their deaths. Four remain, per the U.S. Census.
How much longer will the Centralia Mine Fire burn for?
The fire also led to the relocation of two nearby villages, Byrnesville and Germantown, but is not believed to be a threat to any other surrounding settlements. Yet it could continue burning for another century, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania acknowledges. Some estimates elsewhere place that timespan at more like 250 years.
And in an online explainer on the fire, the state government concedes that it simply cannot afford to bring the blaze to a halt. “Most experts believe that with a very large and very expensive effort the Centralia Mine Fire could be excavated or otherwise extinguished,” the Commonwealth says. “However, the cost for this type of project is currently beyond the capacity of Pennsylvania’s AML [Abandoned Mine Land] Program to address.”
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