It was APRIL 2001.. Before 9/11.. before so much changed..
On April 19, news of that day came from Centralia. At that time during that year in that month, 21 holdout remained in the town … ready for battle.. Only to have the next two decades bring the down down to less than 10… The mayor quoted in the following story also has succumbed to death…
This is how Marc Schogol of the BALTIMORE SUN reported on the then final 21 in 2001:
CENTRALIA, Pa. – Almost 10 percent of Centralia’s populace gathered in Mayor Lamar Mervine’s living room recently to discuss the latest U.S. Census figures.
In toto, the gathering consisted of Mervine and his wife, Lanna.
The census counters might have been surprised to find anyone in Centralia.
Despite an underground coal fire that has been burning for 39 years now, just-released 2000 Census figures show 21 stubborn people still living in this Northwest Pennsylvania coal-country town whose plight has attracted curiosity seekers and national attention.
State and Columbia County officials have been trying to evacuate Centralians for 20 years because of the fire, the smoky fumes that billow out of the ground, and concern that burned-out coal veins might cause the earth to open up and swallow the town.
In 1992, the state, under its power of eminent domain, condemned properties in the two-square-mile borough. Some residents took the money offered and left. The Mervines and others refused.
Asked if he’d ever leave, Lamar Mervine, 85, answered, “Not voluntarily.”
The report on went..
He did volunteer for something – to replace the former mayor, who left town in 1993. Mervine has since won re-election twice, because, his wife said, “nobody else wants the job.”
Fire started in 1962
That’s not surprising. Census figures indicate Centralia isn’t going to count for anything much longer. The population is down from 63 in 1990 – and approximately 1,100 in 1962, when a Memorial Day weekend trash fire ignited a blaze in an abandoned coal mine.
Like Mervine, most of the folks staying put are in their 60s or older. There are no children, no schools, no stores, no activities, no future.
At least four of the 15 homes still standing are vacant and listed for demolition, according to the state Department of Community and Economic Development.
more….
Under eminent domain, the remaining residents – who pay no property tax – could be forcibly removed.
But no one’s had the stomach for it.
“Someone fairly high up thinks there might be political fallout,” said Bill Klink, director of the Columbia County Redevelopment Association.
At the thought of ordering evictions, television and newspaper images of state troopers’ dragging old folks out of their homes flash before the eyes of state officials. Far better, Klink thinks, that the officials wait until the holdouts die out.
Better air than Harrisburg?
Mervine, however, believes the state is trying to scare them out.
“That fire’s been burning for 39 years, and there’s never been a casualty of any kind,” he said, sitting in the homey living room of what once was his parents’ home, too.
As for the smoke and fumes, “we’ve got better air here than they have in Harrisburg,” the mayor of Centralia declared.
He believes it’s all a conspiracy.
“They’re not worried about us one bit,” he said. “The only thing is the borough owns the mineral rights. If they get everybody out of town, they’re going to grab the mineral rights. There’s 40 million tons of coal under this town. They’ll strip the whole place.
“They could put the fire out anytime, but they’re not interested in the fire. They want us out of here.”
Yeah, right, Klink says.
“We all know what a valuable resource coal is,” Klink said. “My answer is that if the U.S. government wanted to get that coal away from you, they’d have done it in less than 20 years, believe me.”
Nor does he buy residents’ claim that they’re in no danger.
“They’ve been very lucky,” he said, “so far.”
By eerie coincidence, many of the sites where smoke rises out of the ground abut the cemeteries that ring the town. (In Centralia, the quick are vastly outnumbered by the dead.) Smoke also hisses from huge cracks in a section of old Route 61 that state officials had to close and build a bypass around. And the sight of all the empty lots and blocks where homes once stood is itself unnerving.
“It’s a little scary now,” acknowledged Mervine, who spends most of his time caring for his wife. “There are so few homes, and they’re pretty well scattered. I’d like to have a few neighbors.”
The municipal building sits nearby, but, except for an ambulance and a fire truck in the garage, there was nothing and no one to be seen there the other day.
When there’s a fire or an ambulance call, Mervine said, emergency personnel respond from surrounding communities. And the state police patrols the town.
Tacked up in the unmanned firehouse is a yellowing resolution adopted by the fire and ambulance companies in 1984.
“Be it further resolved,” it reads, “that these organizations are committed to remaining in the Borough of Centralia as long as people remain.”
That wouldn’t appear to be much longer.
X X X X
If first impressions are always right, nothing can redeem Centralia.
It’s hard to tell that you’ve even reached this place because nearly all of the houses – and the school and the post office and the playground and the churches and just about everything else that was ever here – are gone.
Right across the street from the boarded-up motorcycle repair shop known as the Speed Spot, though, a big red wooden heart is nailed to a tree. “We Love Centralia” is inscribed, probably to prove a point to all those who left.
The guy who put it up has since moved away, too, but that doesn’t negate the sentiment. The people in this borough – there are only 15 – do love it. That’s why they have stayed.
It will be 40 years next month that a fire has been burning in the coal mines underneath Centralia, which sits at the intersection of two state highways about 115 miles northwest of Philadelphia. Most of the town’s 1,100 residents left after the government began a voluntary buyout and relocation program in 1983.
Most, but not all.
“I wouldn’t have gone for a million dollars,” said Joe Moyer, the lone resident on Locust Avenue, which doubles as Route 61. “I’m not going to leave.”
Moyer, 71, lives in a three-bedroom rowhouse with his two dogs, Barker and Penny, and the 125 homing pigeons he raises and trains out back for racing (the season opened yesterday). He has been in Centralia most of his life and plans to die here.
After working in the mines for 25 years, he has a simple enough reason for staying put. He doesn’t think there’s any danger, even with the fire burning beneath the hillside, emitting what the state says are all sorts of gases, including colorless, odorless and potentially deadly carbon monoxide.
His view, however unscientific, is this: If there were any danger, do you think there would be grass growing in the back yard and trees all around?
No one knows for sure how Centralia’s mine fire started in May 1962. One theory is that some people torched garbage in a stripping pit, and the fire spread to the coal beds underground. But people in the area say it could have been extinguished long before the federal government stepped in with $42 million to move the town’s residents elsewhere, saying they were no longer safe.
Twenty years ago, the cost of putting the fire out was estimated at $660 million; the state says that number has only grown.
These days, you don’t see clouds of smoke and flames when you pull into town. In an area atop the hill near two of Centralia’s three cemeteries – the dead far outnumber the living here – what looks like smoke pours out of the ground. Most of it is steam, making it feel like you’re in a big humidifier – except for the foul smell of sulfur.
Nearly all of the vegetation in the immediate area is dead, and the rocks are warm to the touch (some are even hot). If a foot of snow falls here, nothing much accumulates. State officials say the surface temperature in some spots is 1,000 degrees, more than enough to melt the soles off a pair of tennis shoes.
“It’s a spectacle, but it really doesn’t bother me,” said John Lokitis, who at 32 is one of Centralia’s younger residents.
Lokitis lives on West Park Street in a rowhouse grouped with two others, so it looks like he has neighbors.
He doesn’t.
The elderly couple who used to live next door passed away – first her, then him – more than a decade ago, then their son moved out in 1993. Bernie, from two doors down, died a few years back, too, sitting peacefully in his living room chair. (Moyer, who functions unofficially as the town’s constable mostly because he cruises the streets in his blue 1988 Ford pickup, was the one who found him.)
It’s a little lonely for Lokitis since his grandfather, who had been his housemate, died in January. But Centralia has served as the Lokitis family homestead since the early 1900s. His parents live at the other end of the same street, on East Park, which isn’t officially Centralia, but is as close as you can get.
“I’m sure the end’s going to come sooner or later, we’re down to so few people,” said Lokitis, who keeps five cars and drives 120 miles roundtrip every day to Harrisburg for his civilian job with the state police. “I try not to think about it too much.”
Technically, Lokitis and his fellow Centralians are squatters in their own homes. The state invoked its power of eminent domain about 10 years ago, seizing all the properties and the land on which they sit. The coal below, which is owned by the borough, is worth a fortune.
“If they got tough, I guess they could put us out at any time,” said Lamar Mervine, 86, the borough’s mayor.
People in the area think state officials are reluctant to evict elderly people such as Mervine and his wife, Lanna, 85, because it would look like bullying, and there would be political repercussions. They think the state is essentially waiting for the town to die.
Mervine, who prefers to be called by his first name rather than by any ceremonial title, concedes there’s not much to do these days at council meetings, which are held on the first Monday of the month at the borough hall.
Centralia has its own ambulance and firetruck, though the Police Department is defunct. Mail has been delivered door to door since the post office was razed. Snow removal is provided on a volunteer basis by the Hynoski brothers; if you want curbside trash pickup, you have to arrange it yourself.
Mervine is serving a four-year term and is happy doing the job, which doesn’t require too many hours or too much paperwork.
“I’m good if I can last that long,” he said. “Or if there’s a Centralia to be mayor of.”
John Comarnisky, 47, who teaches physics and math at a high school 20 miles away, has served on the borough council since 1992. His mother, who is Centralia’s auditor, considered other houses when the state tried to buy her out for about $40,000, but she liked where she was more than any alternative.
Truth be told, he thinks the town’s most pressing problem is all the wildlife – groundhogs, turkeys, even a bear – that has moved in as residents have moved out. He likens the place to Yellowstone National Park, without the bison.
“We don’t have a problem with carbon monoxide. If we did, we’d move. I’m not a hero,” said Comarnisky, whose late father was born in Centralia. “The state seems bound and determined to save us from something that doesn’t seem to be threatening us very much.”
He wonders why, if it’s so unsafe, there’s no fence on the hill to keep people out.
No fatalities have been linked to the mine fire, according to the state, though a boy once fell into a sinkhole that opened up near where the fire started.
State officials come twice a year to take temperature readings at the site of the underground blaze, which affects 450 surface acres but could spread, they estimate, to 3,000. Steve Jones of the state’s Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation led a busload of visitors from Susquehanna University on a tour last week as part of a seminar the school was holding called “Ghost Town Burning.”
About 25 people donned slickers and carried umbrellas as they made their way around the site. They didn’t realize how lucky they were: Cold or rainy weather makes for the best viewing because there’s more steam.
Other visitors straggle in on their own, some looking for flames shooting out of the ground or something similarly apocalyptic.
“People come to the door and they want to know where the fire is,” said Lanna Mervine, the mayor’s wife. “And I say, ‘You tell me, and then I’ll know.'”
Megan Hullihan, 18, and Andrew Pinamonti, 17, who live a few miles away in Mount Carmel, stopped by on a recent Friday afternoon like they were going for a walk on the beach.
“It was a nice day. We thought we’d check it out and see how it’s progressing,” said Hullihan, who has given guided tours to visiting relatives.
Last summer, her older brother came armed with a container of Jiffy Pop and a video camera to do a self-styled science experiment.
“It popped the corn and burned it,” she said. “He didn’t eat it, though.”
Comarnisky’s greatest hope for Centralia is that the state will give the residents their homes back, which might lead to resettlement. He has heard that a former Centralian is returning after she gets married this summer.
Residents have found other reasons to be encouraged. When the weather gets nice, a few benches set up near the “We Love Centralia” sign become crowded with former townies who return to swap gossip and remember the way things were.
“You have a hard time getting a seat on those benches,” said Lamar Mervine.
“People who moved out would love to come back,” said his wife. “They grabbed the money and went. Now they’re sorry. See, we’re not so dumb. We’re not moving. They can keep their money.”
Mervine gone.. Many others quoted gone… Many things changed since then, the turn of the century… Back when EMBERS OF hope burned bright…
In 2002, embers surely burned bright.
The famed SPEED SPOT, which was one of the last remaining businesses in the town, met a premature end in 2002.
On December 21 of that year, the building mysteriously caught fire and burned to the ground.
The mystery of the fire of the SPEED SPOT remains.. but the fire below surely has been solved. It took the rest away.
