Centralia, PA - modern day ghost town

[RichardX]

I came across this story recently and it reminded me of some of the towns in SK's stories. Unfortunately, this is a real place.

Centralia is a borough and ghost town in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, United States. Its population has dwindled from over 1,000 residents in 1981 to 12 in 2005, 9 in 2007, and 7 in 2010 as a result of a mine fire burning beneath the borough since 1962. Centralia is now the least-populous municipality in Pennsylvania, with four fewer residents than the borough of S.N.P.J..

http://www.offroaders.com/album/cent...-Centralia.htm

[Bev Vincent]

I recently wrote a short story inspired by this place. It's a fascinating place.

[GNTLGNT]

It's like a "thinny" appeared in PA, and a gate to Hell appeared(let's go walkies Cerberus!)...

[nate_watkins]

There's a few towns here in Vermont, that have been abandoned. Mostly smaller mining towns ect...

[wally wonder]

didn't koontz write a story, strange highways, about a town like this?

[Bev Vincent]

What's interesting about Centralia, though, is that it's been burning for decades and could continue to burn for the next century or two. If you look up photos of the town, there are places that look like volcanic wasteland. Roads have huge craters in them. The snow doesn't stick to the ground in some places because of the underground heat.

[PatInTheHat]

It's a very fragrant place, with the wonderful bouquet of Au de Hydrocarbon...and mold.
You can smell it from miles (and miles..and miles....) away if the weathers right..or wrong as the case may be.

[carolina Queen]

I looked it up on the internet I googled it up . It is interesting it must be an eerie feeling traveling around that area . never been there .
Who know it might be a new spawning ground for the mold that grows there to become a new life form . Life arises from death of a place.
I don't think it will be any yellow stone . Although hot springs do exist so they must arise from some where . The universe is just full of
chemical reactors and catalyst to keep it going and biological incubators such as hot springs and geysers .

[RichardX]

Some people wonder why they can't just flood the mine to put the fire out. Unfortunately, it's so hot it would take 20 years of flooding to extinguish a coal fire:

"hotter than the planet Mercury, its atmosphere as poisonous as Saturn's. At the heart of the fire, temperatures easily exceeded 1,000 degrees".

[clownshooter]

Centralia sounds like the backdrop for the movie "Nothing but Trouble" that starred Dan Akroyd, Chevy Chase, John Candy, Demi Moore and others.