The U.S. Bureau of Mines brought in experts, who proposed any number of possible
remedies--digging a deep trench through the town, deflecting the course of the fire with
explosives, flushing the whole thing out hydraulically--but the cheapest proposal would
have cost at least $20 million, with no guarantee that it would work, and in any case no
one was empowered to spend that kind of money. So the fire slowly burned on.
In 1979, the owner of a gas station near the center of town found that the temperature
in his underground tanks was registering 172°F. Sensors sunk into the earth showed that
the temperature thirteen feet under the tanks was almost 1,000°. Elsewhere, people were
discovering that their cellar walls and floors were hot to the touch. By now smoke was
seeping from the ground all over town, and people were beginning to grow nauseated
and faint from the increased levels of carbon dioxide in their homes. In 1981, a twelve-
year-old boy was playing in his grandmother's backyard when a plume of smoke appeared
in front of him. As he stared at it, the ground suddenly opened around him. He clung to
tree roots until someone heard his calls and hauled him out. The hole was found to be
eighty feet deep. Within days, similar cave-ins were appearing all over town. It was about
then that people started getting serious about the fire.
The federal government came up with $42 million to evacuate the town. As people
moved out, their houses were bulldozed and the rubble was neatly, fastidiously cleared
away until there were almost no buildings remaining. So today Centralia isn't really even a
ghost town. It's just a big open space with a grid of empty streets still surreally furnished
with stop signs and fire hydrants. Every thirty feet or so there is a neat, paved driveway
going fifteen or twenty yards to nowhere. There are still a few houses scattered around--
all of them modest, narrow, wood-framed structures stabilized with brick buttresses--and
a couple of buildings in what was once the central business district.
I parked outside a building with a faded sign that said, rather grandly, "CENTRALIA
MINE FIRE PROJECT OFFICE OF THE COLUMBIA REDEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY." The
building was boarded and all but falling down. Next door was another, in better shape,
called Speed Stop Car Parts, overlooking a neatly groomed park with an American flag on
a pole. The shop appeared to be still in business, but the interior was darkened and there
was no one around. There was no one anywhere, come to that--no passing traffic, not a
sound but the lazy clank of a metal ring knocking against the flagpole. Here and there in
the vacant lots were metal cylinders, like oil drums, that had been fixed in the ground and
were silently venting smoke.
Up a slight slope, across an expanse of vacant lots, a modern church, quite large, stood
in a lazy pall of white smoke--St. Ignatius, I assumed. I walked up. The church looked
sound and usable--the windows were not boarded and there were no KEEP OUT signs--
but it was locked, and there was no board announcing services or anything even to
indicate its name or denomination. All around it, smoke was hovering wispily off the
ground, and just behind it, great volumes of smoke were billowing from the earth over a
large area. I walked over and found myself on the lip of a vast cauldron, perhaps an acre
in extent, which was emitting thick, cloudlike, pure white smoke--the kind of smoke you
get from burning tires or old blankets. It was impossible to tell through the stew of smoke
how deep the hole was. The ground felt warm and was loosely covered in a fine ash.
I walked back to the front of the church. A heavy metal crash barrier stood across the
old road and a new highway curved off down a hillside away from the town. I stepped
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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