THE CENTRALIA MINE FIRE
Episode 215 | Historical Events
In this History episode we focus on the Centralia mine fire — a coal seam fire that has been burning beneath a Pennsylvania town since 1962, when firefighters set the town's landfill alight to clean up before Memorial Day. The fire slipped into abandoned coal tunnels and has never been extinguished. More than 1,000 residents were relocated. 500 structures were demolished. The ZIP code was revoked. And five to eight people refused to leave and are still there today, under a legal arrangement that lets them stay until they die.
We trace the decades of failed…
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