Posted on 06/30/2020 7:29:05 PM PDT by DoodleBob
An abandoned stretch of roadway that snakes through a mountainous region of Pennsylvania known as "Graffiti Highway" is now getting covered in dirt after a reported spike in crowds during the coronavirus pandemic.
Pennsylvania State Route 61 has been closed since 1993 due to damage from an underground mine fire in the nearby town of Centralia, about 60 miles northeast of the state capital of Harrisburg. The pavement on the roadway eventually was covered with graffiti, which then became its own tourist attraction.
In recent weeks, though, as the coronavirus pandemic has swept the nation, closing schools and forcing people to work from home, officials in Pennsylvania said there has been a spike in visitors.
Schuylkill County local news website Skook News reported on Monday that hundreds have visited the Centralia-area site, drawing emergency personnel to various incidents.
“It’s ridiculous,” Tom Hynoski, Centralia's secretary, fire chief and emergency management agency director, told the Daily Item. “Oh my God, it’s crazy. They're supposed to be staying home due to the COVID-19, but they're coming from New York and New Jersey to be here."
The groups proved to be the last straw for the property owner, Pagnotti Enterprises, which purchased the property from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation in 2018, according to the Daily Item.
The landowner hired Fox Coal Company to haul dirt to cover "Graffiti Highway" after people trespassing became a liability, according to Vincent Guarna, the company's president.
"I think a few weeks ago, there was a fire there, people just starting fires," Guarna told WNEP-TV. "They're doing a lot of damage to the community there, and it's time that ends right now."
Guarna said that it should take between three to four days to completely cover the roadway with dirt.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I have never heard of this. Heard of the Centralia some 20 years ago when my parents visited up there. But never with all my connection to Cumberland have I heard of underground burning.
Nice phallic symbol.
Great place for kids.
People are so high class.
Missed that, thanks.
Why don’t they hire some fracking teams to frack the whole region, pulverize the rock under it and just crush the fire out by collapsing all the old mine shafts?
Could air still get in if the shafts were gone?
Oh, man, just drive the grade up to Frostburg, the colder, the better, and you’ll see the steam coming out of the bedrock in the median. Unless it finally went out or they finally found a way to starve it, there’s a mine burning deep under there. Not as bad as Centralia, but it’s still chugging along. I pointed it out to my wife one year when we were heading to (I think) Penn Alps for Christmas dinner with my family (or, it may have been The Casselman or Savage River Lodge), but it was still percolating. It’s just one of those ‘things’ that is so ubiquitous to the locals, it isn’t even really a subject for discussion. Kind of a boring little factoid. Hey, it’s it’s coal country. It goes with terrain.
Thanks to those environmental snowflakes and their downstate co-conspirators in Annapolis, all fracking is banned in Maryland. I can remember as a kid, pulling out handfuls of dark, petroleum-smelling oil shale from dirt in the mountainside we lived on. It would be an economic boon to the area, if it weren’t for a dozen infantile protestations from the hippy-dippy contingent. Same goes for coal - now everbody wants ‘clean’ coal, and the sulfur content of the coal up there is too high and the cost of extracting and refining it too prohibitive for it to be of any domestic use now. The area has been dying from a thousand papercuts for a half century now. One more reason to loathe liberals to the point of wanting to watch them die a slow, lingering death.
Yes, that is a pretty accurate description: And even two openings in the porous (Swiss Cheese holed) underground allows enough air underground to keep the fires burning.
Centralia was an underground coal mining district - a really big one - so adjacent mines open up even more airways.
By the way, Lewis and Clark’s expedition through upstate ND and Montana reported several underground coal fires burning the bluffs overhead as they passed by in 1802-1803! That was one way they verified that coal was available near the surface out there in the newly purchased Louisiana Territory. (I understand, but have not confirmed) that several of their fires are still burning.
I went to Frostburg State College decades ago, and had never heard of an underground mine fire there. Interesting info.
Other than the graffiti and the smoke, most roads in PA look just like that.
So a tiny bit of the Great Bathroom Wall in the northeast is being covered up.
Drove through there a few years ago, never saw smoke or anything. Called my friend who lives nearby, he has been riding motorcycles around there for 20+ years...He never saw any sign of smoke or fire. Just sayin...
Oh yes, there were quite a few “interesting” pictures there - I always wonder a bit about people who draw such juvenile images.
There’s an abandoned building on Broad Street going into Philadelphia. Some lovely person took the time and energy to get in, climb to the top and then hang out the windows, on multiple floors, to “tag” the building. And what did they write?? “”BONER FOREVER”” Yep — wow that’s so clever!
We visited Centralia a few years ago, it was interesting but not worth a visit unless you were already in the area for something else.
If I wanted to see graffiti AND put my life in danger...I’d visit CHAZ.
LOL
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