Why Is Centralia, Pennsylvania Still on Fire After 60 Years?

The Short Answer

Centralia, Pennsylvania has been burning underground since 1962, when a trash fire accidentally ignited an exposed coal seam beneath the town — and the fire has never been extinguished, with enough fuel remaining to burn for another 250 years.

How the Fire Started

In 1962, workers at a landfill on the edge of Centralia did something routine: they burned trash over an old strip mine pit to clear it out. What they didn’t account for was an exposed coal seam running directly beneath the surface. The fire caught. The coal ignited. And unlike the trash, it had no intention of going out.

Coal seams don’t burn the way surface fires do. They smolder deep underground, spreading slowly through cracks and tunnels, feeding on oxygen seeping in from above. Once a seam ignites at that depth, conventional firefighting is essentially useless. Early containment efforts failed, and by the late 1960s, it was clear this was not a temporary problem.

What Happened to the Town

For years, residents lived with the consequences — and they were severe. The ground above the fire regularly exceeded 900 degrees Fahrenheit in places. Steam and toxic gases vented through cracks in roads and yards. Carbon monoxide levels in some homes became dangerous without warning.

The defining moment came in 1981, when a 12-year-old boy named Todd Domboski was walking through his grandmother’s backyard and the ground simply opened beneath him. He fell into a sinkhole 150 feet deep, filled with lethal carbon monoxide gas. He survived only because his cousin grabbed his hand and pulled him out before he lost consciousness.

That incident forced the federal government to act. Over the following decade, the U.S. government spent approximately $42 million relocating nearly 1,000 residents. By 1992, Pennsylvania exercised eminent domain over almost every property in town, formally condemning the borough. In 2002, the U.S. Postal Service revoked Centralia’s ZIP code — one of the more surreal administrative acknowledgments that a place had ceased to exist.

Who Still Lives There

Despite the condemnation and relocation efforts, a small number of residents refused to leave. Today, only around five people remain in Centralia, living under a legal agreement that allows them to stay for the remainder of their lives. When they are gone, the town will be completely empty.

The streets still exist. The grid is still visible on maps. But most of the buildings have been demolished. What remains is a landscape of cracked asphalt, patchy grass, and the occasional plume of smoke rising from the earth — a ghost town that is literally still smoldering.

How Long Will It Keep Burning

Geologists estimate that the coal seam beneath Centralia contains enough fuel to sustain the fire for another 250 years. That means it will still be burning in the 2270s. Everyone alive today will be long gone before Centralia stops burning on its own.

There is no realistic plan to extinguish it. The cost and engineering complexity of excavating or flooding the seam would be staggering, and the terrain has been destabilized by decades of burning. The fire is, for all practical purposes, permanent.

Why Centralia Matters

Centralia is not a unique geological event — there are hundreds of underground coal fires burning around the world, including massive ones in China and India. But it is one of the most documented cases of a burning coal seam destroying an entire American community. It is a case study in how a single moment of negligence can produce consequences that outlast generations, and a reminder that some mistakes simply cannot be undone.