How many people died in centralia pennsylvania

Image: Mredden. Centralia, Pennsylvania, has been on fire for about fifty years. Once a town of about a thousand, there are now eight people, in eight houses. Highway 61 has been diverted around the town, and its main street blocked off. But the eight people fight to stay — despite the landfill fire that crawled beneath them into an abandoned coal mine and set up shop.

It has burned since it arrived. The Smithsonian visited Centralia , and described it this way:. From the back kitchen window of his little house on a ridge in east-central Pennsylvania, John Lokitis looks out on a most unusual prospect. Just uphill, at the edge of St. Source: BBC. Source: The New York Times. Source: Centraliapa.

In a interview, year-old Lamar Mervine, then the mayor of the town, spoke of how he and his wife wanted to stay in the town, even as the state wanted to take the property. A handful filed a federal lawsuit, and said their part of the town was safe, accusing the government of wanting the town's coal.

Source: Associated Press. Source: Reuters. Source: Legacy. One of the town's remaining residents, told Cracked in that tourists cause a lot of frustration for those who stayed behind.

They'll always be asking, 'Why do you live here? The worst are the tourists who leave graffiti. For a souvenir, like they wanted a piece of the Lord's cross. Chip chip chip, and they took a part of my stairs. Then they wrote 'Let it burn' on it. Why would they do that? For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App.

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Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. During the s, the town was home to members of the Molly Maguires , a secret society that originated in Ireland and made its way to American coal mines along with Irish immigrants.

In the late s, the Molly Maguires are suspected to have committed a rash of violence within Centralia. As Pennsylvania historian Deryl B.

Molly Maguires at a coal mine, circa By , it was home to over 2, people, most of them miners or their family members. It seems to have started with the Centralia landfill, an abandoned mine pit that had been converted into a garbage dump in Trash was a thorny issue in Centralia, which was full of unregulated dumps, and the city council wanted to solve a problem with unwanted odors and rats. Soon, a fire was raging in a coal seam beneath Centralia.

It spread to mine tunnels beneath town streets, and the local mines closed due to unsafe carbon monoxide levels. Multiple attempts were made to excavate and put out the fire, but all of them failed. The reason, ironically, is the aftermath of the mining that defined Centralia for all of those years. There are so many abandoned mine tunnels in the area that one, many or all could be fueling the fire—and it would be prohibitively expensive and likely impossible to figure out which ones stoke the fire and to close off every single one of them.