What if I told you there was a town that caught fire in 1962 and has been burning ever since. The town of Centralia, Pennsylvania in 1962 was a small but growing coal mining town. At its height it had over 2500 people in the town and surrounding area. In 1962 the town was burning its landfill to reduce the volume and in doing so an exposed vein of coal caught fire.

The fire spread underground and continued to burn for 2 decades before the full scale of the problem was understood. In 1981 a 12 year old boy was outside when a sink hole opened up underneath him. If it weren’t for his cousin’s help he would have fallen 150′ to an underground inferno. By this time the fire had spread to affect 200 acres of land recent studies show that it could burn as long as 250 years.
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