The Best-ever Symbol of Government Incompetence?

American Thinker ^ | May 08, 2011 | Alan M Aszkler

[muawiyah]

Fortunately we've got most of the names from almost all of the stones, and they are now immortalized in digital formats.

They're working on the Chinese family and village memorials now, plus the genealogy books ~

I just found 4 more generations of ancestral women today. They were there once you figured out how to read the names.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

#27: I see a 1958 Chevy - on the left. Possibly a DeSoto or Chrsyler two spaces behind it. A Corvair in the middle of the road, and on the immediate right, a Plymouth (Fury?, Charger), about a 1962 or 63.

We made great cars back in those days. I drove a 57 Chevy 210 with overdrive, 145 HP, and 8 girls on the bench seats.

[Trod Upon]

Can’t we just stuff Democrats down the vents until the fires are smothered?

[Vigilanteman]

I'm not a fan of Big Government or Collectivism, but this column neatly ignores the fact that it was a basically unregulated private enterprise that created this disaster.

Correct. So was the Johnstown flood.

But in the case of Centralia, it was the enviro-whackjobs which turned it from a small disaster into a mega disaster.

In the case of Johnstown, it would also be easy to envision the revenue hungry local government seeing a private fish pond for the wealthy as creating more taxes than a bunch of tenements downstream and approving its construction accordingly as in the Kelo case.

Most conservatives (such as myself) support balanced regulation which includes holding private industry as well as government accountable for any environmental messes which they make.

[Explorer89]

I’m sorry, but I think Centralia already has enough hot air.

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

Don’t waste your time and fuel, there’s nothing to see. Looks like a ghost town, but largely no buildings (ie, no “town”). You can tell there was a community, the way you can tell there was once a house where an empty lot sits: sidewalks and entrance paths disappearing into the weeds. There’s no smoke I ever saw. Just lots of weeds and brush.

FWIW, the last time I talked with a local about it, maybe a year ago, they said what they always say, follow the money. Somebody wanted the land, somebody sold out, somebody holds out. Tales of endless corruption, make your head spin.

For $4/gal, I’d do Gettysburg, not Centralia.

[kearnyirish2]

That’s great that you’re able to do that; I take pictures of these stones when I can because someday in the not too distant future they’ll be gone or illegible (many already are). The GPS coordinates are handy too, for the abandoned cemeteries.

[kearnyirish2]

Thanks for the heads up!

[NativeSon]

From what I heard there were people there still but I didn’t see from where I was. There were other ‘explorers’ roaming about picking their way through the vents

[this_ol_patriot]

Laurel Run in Wyoming Valley (Wilkes-Barre) has been burning since 1915, that was started by a carbide lamp. What I understand the coal seams in the Centralia-Ashland area run at steep inclines making the fires go real deep compared to the more eastern anthracite fields where the seams are flatter.

I lived in Hazleton when this started and remember one in Asley and we had one in Hazleton off of RT. 940.

[Gondring]

There are dozens of coalbed fires in PA, but Centralia is famous because of the surface threat and the borough being condemned.

I wasn’t in PA until several years after the excitement. It must have really been something, from Hazleton!

[Elsie]

Senator Stevens came from the old neighborhood (Brightwood) in Indianapolis.

Now THERE's a tourist attraction!

[Elsie]

It was a little unsettling to think that some 166 year-old woman (Lavinia Lewis) could still be prowling the park...

I've noted a LOT of gravestones like this out west.

My take is that the first one in the ground left a spouse, who probably remarried and moved away, to be buried somewhere else.

[HonestConservative]

That’s what I was thinking. I’m no engineer, but why not capture it instead of trying to kill it?

[muawiyah]

Just looking at the statistics on 46218 the other day and I thought of doing a story that starts with the Big 4 Railyard, McKamey coal yard, and Cohen's Department Store. Then we run through the 30s, and John Dillinger's visits to his dad's, and how all the guys went off to the military and saw the world.

There would be murders, street thugs, guys working in factories, guys working the rails, the Stevens family, the trips to Brown County (down home for all so many of them), and finally the big breakthrough for the African-Americans who got to Brightwood just in time for houses to literally fall apart and drop into the basements.

The statistics around there were always bad; today they're worse; I think I might have gotten accepted to Harvard as an Affirmative Action case (so I'm glad I didn't go there).

[kearnyirish2]

“My take is that the first one in the ground left a spouse, who probably remarried and moved away, to be buried somewhere else.”

I’m sure it was something like that; these are family burial grounds for settlements that were taken over by the park service and razed. In some cases cemeteries were relocated (for example, two of the settlements were covered by new lakes; cemeteries would be relocated for that); in other cases, they were just left to disappear in the woods.