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COPYRIGHT 2005 Smithsonian Institution
From the back kitchen window of his little house on a ridge in east-central Pennsylvania, John Lokitis looks out on a most unusual prospect. Just uphill, at the edge of St. Ignatius Cemetery, the earth is ablaze. Vegetation has been obliterated along a quarter-mile strip; 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. Sometimes fumes seep across the cemetery fence to the grave of Lokitis' grandfather, George Lokitis.
This hellish landscape constitutes about all that remains of the once-thriving town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. Forty-three years ago, a vast honeycomb of coal mines at the edge of the town caught fire. An underground inferno has been spreading ever since, burning at depths of up to 300 feet, baking surface layers, venting poisonous gases and opening holes large enough to swallow people or cars. The conflagration may burn for another 250 years, along an eight-mile stretch encompassing 3,700 acres, before it runs out of the coal that fuels it.
Remarkably enough, nobody's doing a thing about it. The federal and state governments gave up trying to extinguish the fire in the 1980s. "Pennsylvania didn't have enough money in the bank to do the job," says Steve Jones, a geologist with the state's Office of Surface Mining. "If you aren't going to put it out, what can you do? Move the people." Nearly all 1,100 residents left after they were offered federally funded compensation for their properties. Their abandoned houses were leveled. Today Centralia exists only as an eerie grid of streets, its driveways disappearing into vacant lots. Remains of a picket fence here, a chair spindle there--plus Lokitis and 11 others who refused to leave, the occupants of a dozen scattered structures. Lokitis, 35, lives alone in the house he inherited from "Pop"--his grandfather, a coal miner, as was Pop's father before him. For fans of the macabre, lured by a sign warning of DANGER from asphyxiation or being swallowed into the ground, Centralia has become a tourist destination. For Lokitis, it is home.
Across the globe, thousands of coal fires are burning. Nearly impossible to reach and extinguish once they get started, the underground blazes threaten towns and roads, poison the air and soil and, some say, worsen global warming. The menace is growing: mines open coal beds to oxygen; human-induced fires or spontaneous combustion provides the spark. The United States, with the world's largest coal reserves, harbors hundreds of blazes from Alaska to Alabama. Pennsylvania, the worst-afflicted state, has at least 38--an insignificant number compared with China (see sidebar, "Flaming Dragon," p. 58) and India, where poverty, old unregulated mining practices and runaway development have created waves of Centralias. "It's a worldwide catastrophe," says geologist Anupma Prakash of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
Some of the underground fires are natural occurrences. When coal, exposed at or near the surface by erosion, combines with oxygen, a chemical reaction produces heat. That process can build for years; low-grade, soft coals--crumbly and low in carbon--can spontaneously combust, at temperatures as low as 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Lightning or a brush fire can also ignite soft coal. The fires burn downward, acquiring air through fissures in rock and microscopic spaces between grains of dirt. An underground fire may smolder for years, or even decades, without showing signs on the surface. Eventually, however, in a process called subsidence, burning subterranean coal turns to ash, creating huge underground voids and causing overlying ground to crack and collapse--thus allowing more air in, which fans more fire. Much of the landscape of the American West--its mesas and escarpments--is the result of vast, ancient coal fires. Those conflagrations formed "clinker"--a hard mass of fused stony matter. Surfaces formed in this way resist erosion far better than adjacent unfired ones, leaving clinker outcrops. Many ancient fires like those still burn, from the Canadian...
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