On a recent trip my family stopped in the now nonexistent town of Centralia, PA.
In case you're not familiar with Centralia (I linked to the Wikipedia article about it for a full story) it's a small town...excuse me, was a small town...in Pennsylvania not far from an amusement park called Knoebels. In 1962 a bunch of yahoos decided to burn some waste in an abandoned strip mine that ended up setting a 400 acre coal deposit on fire for the next 250 years.
Thanks largely to politics, the fire raged underground out of control. Had they intervened early on they could have stopped the fire; instead it was allowed to burn on while suits pretended it was a non-issue.
They would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for a little boy falling into a backyard subsidence. Whoopsie.
He survived, though. The town largely didn't.
Eventually the government bought out most of the town and razed the structures. Today only a smattering of houses remain, along with a blocked off portion of route 61 (accessible by foot and motorcycle, if you're careful), cemetaries that have more residents than living people in town, and vents from which smoke and gases rise and a town landfill. Oh, and graffiti. Lots of defacement from resident asshats.
I found it utterly fascinating. This town became a ghost town; utterly and completely barren aside from sidewalks. You can't really tell where anything was except for the upheaved sidewalks, actually. There used to be signs telling you about taking your life into your own hands due to unstable ground and benches and Centralia signs, but they're all gone now, probably taken by souvenir collectors and...well, asshats.
It's quite eerie; I couldn't believe that the town disappeared, completely, in an amazingly short amount of time. It's almost postapocolyptic to see trees popping out of pavement. It's even neater to think that this is the town that inspired the video game (and movie) called Silent Hill. Here's some of the sights we saw...
Here's what we believe is the spot where the time capsule is buried. It's supposed to be dug up in 2016. That's assuming it's not being baked by the fire under the town.
My wife got a huge kick out of this. That smiley face is tarred on the road. Evidently the road crew...often out patching the roads as it's cracking and heaving from the ground issues...was willing to have some fun.
My wife said this little church on the hill is now abandoned and was the last one open for the town.
I was surprised to see so many windmills near the site of the town! This was taken from a small rise in what looked like a town landfill. The landfill's surface had little more than fireworks, broken booze bottles, and a toilet and some other home waste scattered around. By home waste, I mean windows, paneling, shutters...evidently as homes were destroyed some of the remains found their way to the landfill. Oh, and there was a lot of pavement broken up, like pieces of roadway laying around.
One of the few homes still standing and inhabited. The black shadow is a person that was out mowing; I blocked it out since I didn't get her permission to use her in the picture. The brick pylons are apparently there to hide support beams; the homes were part of row houses, and as most sold their homes they were demolished. To make up for the now missing parts the beams were hidden in these brick supports. Neat, huh?
This is part of old route 61. The image blacked out here is my daughter. Did you think I'd expose her image on the site?? Yeah, right.The tree on the left is coming from the center of the four-lane. I put this one up for scale...my daughter is on the upper range of average height, so you can get an idea how tall that tree is in the picture.
One of the myriad graffiti in the road of abandoned 61.
Some more of old 61. It's blocked off by huge mounds of bulldozed dirt at each end.
See the heaving and cracking from the heat of the ground fire?
More of the cracking and heaving and graffiti. The blur in the shot above is my daughter again. We hiked quite a way down the road to find the cracking. If you look closely you can see some of the gas rising from the cracks. There were a few weird smells in the town too...one of the things to be careful of in the town is the fact that there are concentrations of poisonous gas from the fire.
One of the reasons I hate seeing what people do. Actually I'm kind of torn...this one shows some artistic merit, but still, I hate the graffiti around the remains of the town. This was again on old 61. It's quite evident that kids use it as a party place.
Another shot of the foilage growing in the middle of the freeway.
This reminded me of watching "The Wonder Years."
Hey...where's the crack in the road we were promised? This was near the beginning of the hike my daughter and I undertook on old 61. I began to think we'd never find it.
This was one of the few buildings we found still standing. Kind of. Apparently this was some kind of building used as a bathhouse for miners in the town, and later a storage building. We don't know what was in that bag near the "door" and my wife refused to stop here, fearing we'd find something we didn't want to find in there. I thought it would be neat, but feared we wouldn't find what she didn't want to find in there and would be disappointed. In the end we didn't look for two very different reasons, I guess.
My wife and I had stopped here about five years ago or so and remembered signs that warn people about the danger of wandering around here; those signs were gone. There were apparently other signs and benches and such here as well at one time. Other pictures can be found at this site. I couldn't believe how a thriving mining town of 1,100 people dwindled to just a few people in such a short amount of time...it's mind-blowingly amazing to me. We actually stopped on the way down and on the way back simply because we couldn't believe our eyes, how little there was left to the place. It's like the town just shriveled up in embarassment after letting petty politics keep from taking decisive action to stop the fire when it first started, and the fact that they were warned about violations previously in relation to the burning of the landfill trash and they continued to ignore regulations.
Simply. Amazing.
It's been a long post, and there's plenty of information floating around about Centralia as well as a number of references that can be found off Wikipedia of where Centralia has shown up directly or indirectly (like the previously mentioned Silent Hill movie).
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment