After the carbon monoxide levels continued to rise--and a 12-year-old boy fell into a burning sinkhole in the early 1980s--efforts to extinguish the fire redoubled. The authorities pumped water underground. They put clay over the surface to prevent oxygen from sustaining the flames. They pumped a slurry of fly ash (ash from coal-burning fire plants), water, and rocks into the abandoned mine. Nothing worked.

The goal of all these methods was to put out the fire, either by walling it off and preventing it from spreading or cutting off all supplies of oxygen, but within a few years it had gotten too large and spread out, capable of drawing from any number of places the scant amount of oxygen it needed. A coal fire can burn in an atmosphere that's just 1 or 2 percent oxygen. By comparison, the air we breathe typically has 21 percent oxygen.

Glenn Stracher is a professor at East Georgia State College, who has been studying the Centralia site and coal fires around the world since the 90s.

“It’s not like a forest fire, where you see where the combustion is, and you go out and extinguish it.” Stracher says. “There are miles and miles and miles of underground passageways in Centralia. Who knows exactly in what passage or passages the combustion is occurring?”

Faced with the impossible task of putting out a fire that would not die, in 1983 Congress allocated $42 million dollars to relocate the residents of the town, buying up their homes and houses, and then demolishing the structures, leaving the land to smoulder. Today, the town is abandoned, undone by the very material that kept it afloat: coal.

Down In The Mine

“I hope when I’m gone and the ages shall roll,

My body will blacken and turn into coal,

I’ll look down from the door of my heavenly home,

And pity the miner diggin’ my bones.” -Merle Travis

The perfect conditions for the formation of coal are a highly forested or vegetated area with waterlogged ground. As the plants die and their remains sink into the sodden soil, the huge volume of dead vegetation just sits. Microorganisms that would normally break down the remains can’t survive under the water. As a result, the mass of leaves and trunks and stems doesn’t decompose like the piles of leaves you see in the fall, but continues to build up over time. Eventually, it gets covered by soil and other vegetation and buried deep in the earth, where the weight compresses it into the hard, carbon-rich material that we mine today.

Twenty-five states in the U.S. mine that compressed vegetable matter. Pennsylvania alone produces 5 percent of the country’s coal. But it’s the quality, not the quantity, of the Pennsylvania coal that matters. Pennsylvania specializes in anthracite, the hardest form of coal, a shiny black substance with a very high concentration of carbon.

Its high carbon content means that it can burn for longer, with less soot and with more heat than other types of coal. That's unfortunate for Centralia, whose anthracite has been burning for over 50 years.

But while coal proved to be that town’s undoing, our society’s reliance on coal has a much more far-reaching impact on climate. Burning of coal releases sulfur and nitrogen, creating smog and acid rain, as well as toxic carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas that is responsible for global warming. Scrubbers and filters in power plants take out many of coal’s worst pollutants when it's burned, but carbon dioxide still pours into the air.

In China, the only country that produces and consumes more coal than the United States, constant burning of coal, with limited filtration, is responsible for smog that clogs lungs and obscures skylines.