In May 1962, the borough council of Centralia, Pennsylvania, ordered a clean-up of the town's landfill, which was located in an abandoned strip-mine pit. Workers set fire to the trash, intending to extinguish it before the annual Memorial Day parade. Unbeknownst to them, the pit intersected an exposed vein of anthracite coal that connected directly to a vast network of abandoned underground mine shafts.
The fire seeped deep into the subterranean coal seams, where thick, carbon-rich anthracite provided near-bottomless fuel. Because anthracite burns at extremely high temperatures and requires minimal oxygen, the fire spread rapidly through thousands of feet of interconnecting tunnels. Over the following decades, dangerous gases like carbon monoxide spewed from cracked roads, ground temperatures soared above 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and sinkholes swallowed property.
Repeated attempts to flush, smother, or excavate the blaze failed completely due to the complexity of the labyrinthine mine workings. By the late 1980s, the federal government spent millions buying out residents and revoking the town's ZIP code. Experts estimate the underground fire still has enough fuel to burn for another 250 years.