Posted on 02/05/2010 9:11:55 AM PST by JoeProBono
Standing before the wreckage of his bulldozed home, John Lokitis Jr. felt sick to his stomach, certain that a terrible mistake had been made.
He'd fought for years to stay in the house. It was one of the few left standing in the moonscape of Centralia, a once-proud coal town whose population fled an underground mine fire that began in 1962 and continues to burn.
But the state had ordered Lokitis to vacate, leaving the fourth-generation Centralian little choice but to say goodbye - to the house, and to what's left of the town he loved.
"I never had any desire to move," said Lokitis, 39. "It was my home."
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
As a staunch, hard-core libertarian, I think Lokitis ought to be perfectly free to allow himself and his family to die from poisonous gases and be trapped in a hot burning sinkhole! This is an outrageous example of communism gone mad!
Wow. This ought to be in breaking news.
I remember my dad talking about this thing way back.
So why hasn't some kind of steam gizmo been stuck into it?
This town has contributed mightily to global warming by not extinguishing the fire. They should be held accountable.
I wonder how far the authorities would have gone. Would they have stormed his house? Would they killed him to save him?
ML/NJ
It’s a shame they couldn’t collapse the mine and smother the fire with explosives. You can blast out an oil well fire, why not a mine?
ML/NJ
I can see perhaps requiring people who have children or mentally incapacitated adults living with them, being required to move. But if mentally competent adults want to take the risks for the sake of staying in their hometown, I don't see where the government has any business forcing them out.
It would be different if the government had a viable plan for putting out the fire, that required demolishing certain houses and having others vacated for the long term. In that scenario, the overall effect would be to protect the long-term property rights of the many people whose homes and land had been rendered seriously unsafe. But there's no such plan.
It does strike me as odd that it's impossible to put out this fire. I know there are huge networks of old mines in that area, but still . . . Wouldn't bombing the area, collapsing all the mines, and thus cutting off the air supply to the underground fires, do the trick? You'd still have force people out of their homes, but if you could the fire out, then people could have had their land back.
The quirky legal twist to all this is that these people only own the surface of their land. In this part of the country, virtually all residential and business property is bought and sold without "mineral rights", which were stripped off and sold to other parties a century or more ago.
Apparently they've tried
The story began sometime in 1962 along the outskirts of town when trash was burned in the pit of an abandoned strip mine, which connected to a coal vein running near the surface. The burning trash caught the exposed vein of coal on fire. The fire was thought to be extinguished but it apparently wasn't when it erupted in the pit a few days later. Again the fire was doused with water for hours and thought to be out. But it wasn't. The coal then began to burn underground. That was in 1962. For the next two decades, workers battled the fire, flushing the mines with water and fly ash, excavated the burning material and dug trenches, backfilled, drilling again and again in an attempt to find the boundaries of the fire and plan to put the fire out or at least contain it.All efforts failed to do either as government officials delayed to take any real action to save the village. By the early 1980s the fire had affected approximately 200 acres and homes had to be abandoned as carbon monoxide levels reached life threatening levels. An engineering study concluded in 1983 that the fire could burn for another century or even more and "could conceivably spread over an area of approximately 3,700 acres."
As time passed, each feeble attempt to do anything to stop the fire or help the residents of Centralia would cost more and more due to the fires progression. Over 47 years and 40 million dollars later the fire still burns through old coal mines and veins under the town and the surrounding hillsides on several fronts.
There are huge networks of underground mines in that area. It’s impossible to seal them all off, because there are small channels between the mines and the surface all over the place, and more constantly forming in this scenario, where the ground is unstable due to the fire. Heavy bombing of the area to collapse all the mines is probably the only way to put out the fire, and even then there would probably be small pockets that kept burning. But I think it would eliminate any real danger of ground collapse and people falling into hellish voids, and get the air quality back into safe range.
Appalling. The government screwed up 30 years ago, and rather then trying to find a solution, doing nothing has resulted in what we see now. Pathetic.
My dad drove us from Connecticut to see this in...oh...about 1964 or so. Made many trips. Used to rock hound on the coal mine dumps. Remember one day when he split a rock in half exposing a fossilized fern . For one second it was green...he saw it, I saw it and then it turned grey black. I think this isn’t suppose to be possible but I’m not sure. Anyways...we saw it.
Shh! Do you want them to know?!
Bush’s fault?
Back in 1958 I had a teacher from Centralia and she mentioned the fires were burning then and had been for many years.
So I don’t understand this 1962 date.
I grew up in PA and still have family there (I left in 1964). I seem to remember one of the coal companies offered to come in and strip mine ahead of the fire to put it out by removing the coal in it's path. Either the state or the local government shot the idea down because they wanted paid for the coal. The mining company was willing to do the job for the coal they received.
It's a safe bet that the politicians concerned were greedy Democrats.
No word from Algore.
There are open smoking vents that give off hot gases and the heat keeps parts snow and ice free.
I'll look for the pics I took and post them.
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