"Over the course of a hundred years, the small town population swelled until the anthracite business dwindled in the 1950s. With it went many of its residents, though in the early 1960s there were still over 1,500 people still living in Centralia and its immediate vicinity. It was an idyllic rural community, complete with a redbrick school building, a church with a steeple, locally-owned businesses and a small police & fire department office. Today, nearly every building in town has been leveled and fewer than a dozen people remain."
"As my gaze fixed to look at the entire view, it started making sense. We were standing at a firehouse and town government building. From its front door, looking northeast, we saw the intersection and I had a flashback of an ex-girlfriend’s rural New York town, which was really just one intersection itself. Here there were two churches (the second was hidden from view by a gravel pit we had seen at the west end of town) and what turned out to be four cemeteries. One church, the Ukrainian Orthodox building just northwest on Locust, obscured the first two graveyards; the hidden church, the St. Ignatius at the southwest corner of town, was home to two more – the Odd Fellows Cemetery and St. Ignatius Cemetery. The alleyways by the parked car used to be streets. The bricks were probably what were left of torn-down homes, and I’d be willing to bet that under the trash heaps were disturbed earth and, beneath that, hushed by soil and dead leaves, utility pipes and wiring. It was like a footprint – more a skeleton than a town."
"Shortly after the government buyout began, Penn State researchers spoke with remaining Centralians and found that a full third of them believed the fire was kept alive by a government conspiracy to swindle the residents out of the coal under their feet, likely a theory fueled in part by the July 1983 GAI report regarding trench-digging. “They know how to put this fire out,” one resident told them, “they’re just experimenting with us." Residents at the time had estimated 35 million tons of anthracite coal under Centralia. Selling at $100 a ton, there could be over $3 billion in coal still waiting to be excavated. Some residents believe this is the true reason they were offered $42 million to evacuate once the GAI report was published, which would severely undercut a full excavation and allow for minimal governmental risk of increasing overheads. Locals believed that if the government fully bought and evacuated the town, even spending an estimated $60 to $80 million for trench-digging to stop the fire – which, officials had always told the residents, was “too expensive” – the government would be sitting on billions of dollars of coal to mine at the government’s leisure."
"At the bottom was the normal dirt and grass, which had only ever been disturbed by the eventual tearing down of the house. Leftover garbage from the original tearing down of the house – linoleum floors from the ‘80s buyouts, newer drywall from the ‘90s – rested on the ground. Apparently the trash collectors never bothered to pick it up. After that, what sat above those creature comforts varied from lot to lot as we walked down the street. Sometimes it was another 10 or 20 years of dust and dirt, grass and spider webs and anthills blanketing a mash-up of kitchen and family room. Other times, depending on the age of the buyout, it skipped that layer to the final addition to most of Centralia’s construction heaps: new trash. We found ourselves able to date the trash within a couple years based on the packaging of soda bottles, hamburgers and prophylactic wrappers. The familiarity of geological commercialism, wrapped comfortably in my cynicism, warmed me from the creeping feeling of Armageddon preying on the afternoon."
"“Someone has been waiting very patiently to get their hands on this coal,” Anne Marie Devine, then-mayor of Centralia, said. “We’re just not that gullible.” The DCA and the DER initially claimed that the dangers of the mine fire prompted them to set an original deadline to shut down the town completely by June 30, 1994, but later admitted this deadline was agreed based on the expiration of the original federal buyout program, which at the time was in August of that year. Furthermore, residents and Centralia officials argued that if the town were to be completely shut down by the state, it would legally cease to exist and therefore its coal rights would escalate to the nearest body of government – the very state offices forcing them out."
DisasterLand: Centralia. Coming Soon.
Like us on FaceBook to stay updated!
No comments:
Post a Comment