Posted on 05/26/2012 6:21:58 AM PDT by Library Lady
Fifty years ago on Sunday, a fire at the town dump ignited an exposed coal seam and still burns today. It set off a chain of events that eventually led to the demolition of nearly every building in Centralia -- a whole community of 1,400 simply gone.
After a contentious battle over the future of the town, the side that wanted to evacuate won out. By the end of the 1980s, more than 1,000 people had moved and 500 structures were demolished under a $42 million federal relocation program.
But some holdouts refused to go -- even after their houses were seized through eminent domain in the early 1990s. They said the fire posed little danger to their part of town, accused government officials and mining companies of a plot to grab the rights to billions of dollars' worth of anthracite coal, and vowed to stay put.
After years of letting them be, state officials decided a few years ago to take possession of the homes. The state Department of Community and Economic Development said Friday it's in negotiations with one of the five remaining homeowners; the others are continuing to resist, pleading their case in federal court.
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
Seems like there was one in Alaska.
I’ve seen sod fires started by lightning.
I live in the North Dakota Bad Lands which were formed in part by burning coal seams. There is a burning coal mine about 40 miles south of me that has been burning for centuries. There are no coal mines in the area. In winter, the ground is warm enough that snow melts over the location of the burning vein but lays deep in the rest of the area. Presumably, this fire was set by lightning. The fires are natural and no cause for land and resource grabbing.
I made a trip out there a few years ago to check it out. The most striking thing, to me at least, is the scale of the highways leading into/out of the town: completely out of scale with what remains. The anthracite region of Pa. is a very interesting (often bleak) part of the country.
Pump in the recovered fracking fluids!
This is truly an interesting earth we live on.
I remember reading of such a coal seam fire near Farmington NM years ago.
Someday I intend to go see the Centralia ghostown for myself. There are quite a number of these fires around the world. China has a coal seam fire that has been burning for more than a century.
It seems an enterprising person would be able to devise a way to turn that combustion into energy to heat a home, heat water and produce electricity.
Exactly what I was thinking. Tap into it for energy and heat.
I drove through Centraila a few years ago with my niece and her husband on our way back from Knoebels Park.
We drove past areas fenced off with warning signs not to enter as the ground was unstable and dangerous and seeing the smoke from the still burning underground coal fire coming up in some areas. Some of the roads in and out of the town are closed or detoured around the dangerous areas.
The oddest thing was driving through the town seeing the neatly laid out streets and sidewalks and driveways leading up to concrete slab or an empty plot of overgrown weeds where a house had once stood.
But the weirdest thing I saw was a still standing but long ago boarded up house surrounded by overgrown weeds, still decorated with Christmas lights and other Christmas decorations like a long faded and sad looking wreath on the door, as if the occupants suddenly left one day and in a great hurry and never came back and sitting right next door to a neatly kept house that some lone holdout was still living in.
The only real sign of life in the town was the fire station that still is operating.
The cheapest way of dealing with this might be to just pump water underground. There would be steam explosions, of course, but that would help to break up the coal so that the water could penetrate further.
Although I was wondering where these underground fires get enough oxygen from to sustain burning for centuries, I started thinking about molten earth and volcanoes, and obviously there is plenty of oxygen even many miles beneath the Earth's surface to sustain combustion. I hadn't ever really thought about this before.
You learn something new everyday - ..including how Elizabeth Warren is an Indian and Obama spent less money than any other recent President...(sarc)..
Save your money — and time! Centralia is definitely a case of “nothing to see here.” Scrub, weeds, and bad roads. The buildings are long gone. Hershey, Gettysburg, and innumerable other places in PA that are educational, entertaining, worth the trip.
The earth retains primordial heat in its molten core. Lord Kelvin calculated that the earth couldn't be more than tens of millions of years old if this source were to account for the flux of heat we can measure near the surface, and this contradicted geological estimates of the earth's age. The paradox was famously resolved by the discovery of radioactivity, and the presence of radioactive decay in the earth's mantle, which sustains and enhances this flow.
A quick trip using Google Earth gave me what I needed to know about it. And no I don’t work for Google! It’s an amazing resource, though.
Indeed. It seems like wasted energy as it is.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.