Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire Read online

  Preface ................................................................................................................viii

  List of Acronyms .................................................................................................1

  1: A Bad Day ...................................................................................................... 2

  2: Badlands ......................................................................................................10

  3: Council's Fire ..............................................................................................19

  4: Natural Forces ............................................................................................. 27

  5: Missed Opportunities ............................................................................... 33

  6: Scranton's Grand Plan ...............................................................................39

  7: Too Long a Wait .........................................................................................44

  8: Sideshow ......................................................................................................53

  9: In the Fire's Grasp ......................................................................................57

  10: The Conspiracy Theory ............................................................................68

  11: Lonely Battle ...............................................................................................72

  12: Awakening ...................................................................................................79

  13: Infighting ..................................................................................................... 92

  14: Increasing Danger ................................................................................... 103

  15: Scattered Leaves ...................................................................................... 113

  16: The Big Picture ........................................................................................ 126

  17: Fateful Tumble ........................................................................................ 137

  18: Watt and Thornburgh ............................................................................. 142

  19: Thornburgh in Centralia ........................................................................ 154

  20: Organizing the Resistance ..................................................................... 159

  21: Fire in the Night ...................................................................................... 171

  22: On the Road ............................................................................................. 183

  23: The Year of the Scream ........................................................................... 197

  24: Unity Day .................................................................................................. 216

  2S: Victory ....................................................................................................... 232

  26: Relocation ................................................................................................ 246

  27: The End of Nearly Everything .............................................................. 256

  28: Epilogue .................................................................................................... 266

  Index ................................................................................................................. 270

  About the Author ........................................................................................... 285

  It will soon have been fiftyyears since that day in May 1962 when a municipal cleanup project in Centralia, Pennsylvania, went horriblywrong and resulted in a fire that spread into a labyrinth of abandoned anthracite coal mines and sealed the town's fate. I have been on this story for more than three decades and find it as compelling today as I did the evening of November 1, 1976, when Tony Gaughan stood up at a meeting of Centralia Council and began a harangue about a fire burning underground near his house.

  The world seems never to tire of the Centralia story. Every year I am interviewed by someone about this strange and terrible fire. Journalists come from Germany, the Russian Federation, Switzerland, Japan, and, of course, America, eager to hear what went so horribly wrong in Centralia and why. And these people ... why do they stay? Isn't it dangerous? I explain that the ten to twelve remaining Centralia residents, the last of the thousand who lived here in 1980, have different reasons for staying. For some it is old age, for others pure obstinacy. They are the diehards of the diehards. As for the danger, I point to the one remaining house in the heart of the mine fire impact zone and say I would not want to live there. Nor would I feel particularly safe in a house down the hill from where we stand, supported by the brick buttresses that were a distinctive feature of the Centralia relocation. I say that the other ones, farther away, are safe for now. The fire has moved under blocks where hundreds of people lived before the relocation, and has stayed on a westerly course. For now.

  We journalists no longer have this story to ourselves. Since my book, originally titled Unseen Danger, was first published in 1986, no less than seven novels, five plays, three feature films, and two comic books have incorporated the Centralia mine fire in one way or another into their stories. Among the novels, my favorites are The Planets and The Constellations, by Jennifer Finney Boylan, whom I first met in her past life as James; Tawni O'Dell's Coal Run; and Lisa Scottoline's Dirty Blonde. I thoroughly enjoyed the Pittsburgh-based Squonk Opera's wild and raucous rock opera, Inferno. Of the feature films, Silent Hill (2006) is my favorite. Based on a series of Japanese video games, it is about an abandoned town above a mine fire (albeit one populated by monsters and demons). The screenwriter, Roger Avary, has acknowledged being influenced by the Centralia story. The number of people who come to Centralia because of Silent Hill is astonishing.

  I wish to thank Globe Pequot Press and their acquisitions editor Erin Turner for agreeing to put out a new edition of an old book. Bill Klink, the now-retired executive director of the Columbia County Housing and Redevelopment Authority, was candid and helpful during our interviews about the Centralia relocation. So was Jack Carling, who planned the relocation for the Pennsylvania Department of Community Affairs and watched over it for many years. Jacqueline Allen, the open-records officer for the Department of Community and Economic Development, successor to DCA, plowed through dozens of boxes of documents inherited from Bill Klink and his staff looking for specific files I needed. Through a chance meeting she had with her old friend Anne Brennan Kalinoski at a supermarket near Mount Carmel, I learned that the Brennan family was willing to open up the papers of their late father to me. Robert Brennan was an engineer for the U.S. Bureau of Mines and U.S. Office of Surface Mining and a critical figure in the Centralia story (he was also the estranged brother of Tom Brennan, my editor at the News-Item in Shamokin). I spent a productive morning in the attic office of Robert Brennan's former home with Anne, an old friend from the Hardshell Bar during my Shamokin days, and her brother Michael. Robert Brennan was the sort of public servant whom citizens admire but bosses find annoying. In the fall of 1982, he insisted on telling the public the unvarnished truth: that the Centralia mine fire had broken through an underground barrier installed in the late 1960s and was moving quickly toward homes. This did not endear him to elected officials or Wash
ington bureaucrats struggling to avoid getting stuck with the tab for a project to stop the Centralia mine fire. But it was the truth, and Brennan survived the storm.

  I need also to thank David R. Philbin of the U.S. Office of Surface Mining in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, who located documents and photographs I needed for this new edition ofmybook, and Tim Altares of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, who, following the mandate of a new state open-records law, made many Centralia documents available to me that I had never seen before. I was somewhat amused to find a document relating to my last attempt to search their archives, in 1982 when I was writing the original book and the old law was in effect. The document was a checklist of what I could see and what I couldn't. Everything in the latter category was made available to me this time around.

  I need to mention two Toms: Dempsey and Larkin. Tom Dempsey is the retired postmaster of Centralia, when it still had a post office, and is the unofficial historian for a town that now exists mainly in memory. He keeps Centralia alive online, putting much of his knowledge and energy into the Cent-Cony newsgroup on Yahoo. He was nearly always able to answer my questions about people and events in Centralia past. I hope he eventually succeeds in getting a historical marker for Centralia, which the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission recently rejected. Tom Larkin, the former president of Concerned Citizens Action Group Against the Centralia Mine Fire, sat for an interview despite his ill health. We talked for a couple of hours at Grace Tavern down the street from his apartment in Philadelphia, snacked on Cajun green beans, and relived the past. He has much to be proud of for his efforts, as do Joan Girolami and the others who were active in Concerned Citizens, to help their suffering fellow Centralians escape the mine fire.

  Finally I must thank my wife, Lisa Brittingham, for being my biggest supporter. My daughters, Elizabeth and Lydia DeKok, are occasionally amused by the journalists who troop to our living room in Harrisburg's Shipoke neighborhood to interview me about Centralia, especially the Japanese television crew that put me through my paces. When the tape arrived and I was dubbed into Japanese, they thought it was among the funniest things they had ever seen.

  Centralia itself is not a funny story. It is profoundly sad and tragic, but even that kind of story has its humorous moments. Just not many, as you will see.

  AML Fund: Abandoned Mine Lands Fund (federal)

  ARC: Appalachian Regional Commission (federal)

  ARDA: Appalachian Regional Development Act (federal)

  CCHD: Centralia Committee for Human Development (local citizen group)

  CHA: Centralia Homeowners Association (local citizen group)

  CHD: Campaign for Human Development (Catholic Church)

  DCA: Department of Community Affairs (state)

  DER: Department of Environmental Resources (state)

  DMMI: Department of Mines and Mineral Industries (state)

  EPA: Environmental Protection Agency (federal)

  FEMA: Federal Emergency Management Agency (federal)

  OSHA: Occupational Safety and Health Administration (federal)

  OSM: U.S. Office of Surface Mining (federal; Department of the Interior)

  PEMA: Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (state)

  PennDOT: Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (state)

  USBM: U.S. Bureau of Mines (federal)

  OMETHING WAS WRONG AT THE CODDINGTON HOME. AN AMBULANCE had raced up Locust Avenue and pulled in at John Coddington's former gas station, where he and his family still had a small store and lived in the upstairs apartment. His neighbors feared the worst, knowing the Coddington home had more poison gas from the mine fire than most in Centralia.

  People hurried outside and gathered in the cold near the ambulance. They could smell the sulfurous fumes venting from the tall pipe off to one side of the station. Had the carbon monoxide that crept into their homes from the fire in the old coal mines of Centralia finally claimed a life? It was an article of faith in this Pennsylvania village that neither the U.S. Department of the Interior, now headed by Secretary James G. Watt, nor their own governor Dick Thornburgh would do anything to stop the fire until it claimed a life. Such cynicism was born of too many years of watching the local, state, and federal governments vacillate over how to deal with the fire. Now it had become a raging monster that threatened to destroy their community.

  The ambulance attendants emerged from the building carrying a stretcher. On it was John Coddington, the sixty-two-year-old former mayor of Centralia, followed by his wife Isabelle, and son Joe. He had five children in all, but Anne lived in Virginia, Mary a few miles away outside of Ashland, John Jr. in Harrisburg, the state capital, and Colleen was away at Penn State. Coddington had become something of a spokesman for those residents of Centralia who lived day-to-day with the very real dangers of the mine fire. Not every family in Centralia was affected by the fire, but it was a nightmare for those who were. He had been overcome by the gases but was still alive, albeit delirious. The attendants lifted the stretcher into the ambulance, closed the door, and drove away. It was March 19, 1981.

  Centralia had just under a thousand residents in 1981, the year its mine fire came to national as well as international attention. It was an isolated village, straddling a high, narrow valley in the Appalachian Mountains of east-central Pennsylvania, at the southern tip of Columbia County. It was part of what is called the Anthracite Region, after the hard, shiny, high-BTU coal that is mined in that region and almost nowhere else in the United States. Philadelphia was 125 miles to the southeast of Centralia, New York City 190 miles to the east, and Pittsburgh 230 miles to the southwest. Beneath the village was a labyrinth of abandoned tunnels where miners had dug coal for over a century to fuel the boilers of industry and heat the homes of the eastern United States.

  Once life in Centralia had been better, a legacy of the close social ties that result when people share a common hardship and danger like coal mining. It was never Brigadoon-there were mild tensions between the major ethnic groups in the town, especially before World War II, and crime was not unknown. But by the late 1950s, Centralia had much of the trust, innocence, and friendliness that people associate with the best of smalltown life. Two events in the early 1960s laid waste to all of that. First, in the summer of 1961, came the abduction, sexual assault, and murder of thirteenyear-old Jane Benfield of Centralia by Frank Earl Senk, a traveling magazine salesman and sexual predator, of which more will be said later. The second was the mine fire, which ignited in 1962 and gradually tore Centralia apart. Like the victims of the toxic waste tragedies at Love Canal, New York, and Times Beach, Missouri, the people of Centralia learned to cope as best they could with illness and the threat of death. They faced the possible loss of home and community, of all they had worked and saved for. As a final blow, they faced official indifference and even hostility to their plight. When the people of Centralia finally rebelled, it was too late to save their community. They had no desire to leave Centralia, but by 1981 it was increasingly clear that many of them, if not all, would have to go. The events of March 19 drove home how far the situation had deteriorated after so many years of government bungling and neglect.

  John Coddington was born in Centralia and went to work in the mines the evening he graduated from high school. He didn't work there very long, but it was long enough to give him a moderate amount of anthrasilicosis in his respiratory system. The disease is better known as black lung, the plague of coal miners everywhere. It would make Coddington much more susceptible to ill effects from the mine fire gases forty years later.

  His first gas station was located a quarter mile south of where it would be in 1981. In the late 1950s, when the state changed the course of Route 61, the main highway through Centralia, Coddington moved his station to South Locust Avenue. It was a fateful act; beneath the new site was a mine gangway that one day would lead directly to the heart of the mine fire.' The gangway would allow carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and oxygen-deficient at
mosphere produced by the mine fire easy access to Coddington's home and those of his neighbors through cracks in the rock and the foundations of their houses.

  By 1981, daily life for the Coddingtons and several other families had assumed a horrible routine of visits by the state gas inspectors, clanging gas alarms that only seemed to sound in the middle of the night, extraordinary drowsiness, nausea and headaches caused by the gases, and anxiety. Yet they tried to maintain their lives in as ordinary a fashion as possible. To a visitor, the only sign that something was wrong might be the electronic carbon monoxide monitor, ticking softly and rhythmically, printing out a continuous paper tape, often sitting in the living room next to the television set or piano. Gas inspectors Edward Narcavage, Wayne Readly, and Jeff Stanchek, who worked for the Department of Environmental Resources, had the task of making certain that none of the residents of the mine-fire impact zone-the part of Centralia most affected by the mine fire-died from the gases. That morning they arrived at the Coddington home around nine. It was the first stop on their rounds, which included fifteen houses or apartments and St. Ignatius Elementary School. In some homes they checked the air at one location, but at the Coddingtons and others they did several tests. Although the Coddington readings were not at the danger level that morning-they would have been considered extraordinary in any normal community-the inspectors and families knew that safe gas levels could become fatal five minutes later. The gases were that unpredictable.

  Chief inspector Narcavage was especially worried that day about the backfilling, three days earlier, of a deep, steaming hole across the street from the Coddingtons where a neighbor boy, Todd Domboski, twelve, had almost died on Valentine's Day. The hole was caused by a subsidence, when the earth and rock above a mine chamber suddenly collapses. This can create a deep hole reaching all the way to the surface or barely ripple the ground, depending on subsurface conditions. A mine fire can trigger a subsidence by causing a mine roof to expand, then contract and crack. Narcavage feared the gases that had vented from the hole would now enter nearby homes. The subsidence had been backfilled on March 16, and a day later the Coddingtons had a serious gas incident. The monitor showed one hundred parts per million, the highest possible reading on the dial, and the tape showed the gas lingered for forty-two minutes. It was an unusually long event, particularly considering that the family had opened all the windows in the house as soon as the alarm sounded.