The Fire

Experts are still debating the exact cause of the fire, but they all agree on three things: it was unexpected, rapid, and preventable.

What we do know is that during preparation for Memorial Day, Borough personnel ignited a fire to burn waste at the dump on May 27th. Five volunteer firefighters were hired to oversee it. When the burn had ended, the team doused the flames with water.

Flames were spotted again on May 29th. The team took to it with hoses once more. One week later, on June 4th, flames resurfaced. The flames were doused for the third time.

The Centralia Fire Company bulldozed the garbage to shift piles around in search of concealed fire beneath the layers. A few days later, they made the horrible discovery: a 15-foot hole that had previously been hidden under garbage was never filled with noncombustible material.

Experts believe it was this hole that provided the pathway for the flames into the underground mine tunnels.

On July 2nd, Monsignor William J. Burke noticed a foul smell in the church that was emanating from the smoldering trash and coal. Despite his complaints, the city council continued to allow others to dump garbage into the pit.

Eventually, a member of the council contacted Clarence “Mooch” Kashner, president of the Independent Miners, Breakermen, and Truckers Union, to inspect the smell. Together with DMMI engineer Gordon Smith and mine inspector Art Joyce, they tested the pit and detected smoke and carbon monoxide levels in line with a coal-seam fire.

Coal-seam fires are easily fueled by oxygen and release toxic gases above ground as they burn. It doesn’t take much for them to reach a point of no return. David DeKok (author of Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire) describes the fire as, “a world where no human could live, hotter than the planet Mercury, its atmosphere as poisonous as Saturn’s. At the heart of the fire, temperatures easily exceeded 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Lethal clouds of carbon dioxide and other gases swirled through the rock chambers.”

By August 9, 1962, these carbon monoxide levels were declared lethal, and the city closed the mines.

The Lehigh Valley Coal Company (LVCC) received formal notice of the fire with a request for assistance. The city deliberately omitted the cause of the fire to guarantee support. The LVCC and the Susquehanna Coal Company held a meeting where Deputy Secretary of Mines, James Shober Sr., stated his expectations for the state to finance the cost of digging out the fire.

There would be two excavation attempts.

On August 22, Bridy Inc. began excavating on an estimated $20,000 contract. They started digging at the expected location of the fire but ran into problems almost immediately. As soon as equipment exposed the mine chambers to oxygen, it rushed in and fueled the fire. Thus, as they excavated, the fire spread even faster.

On October 29th of that year, the project ran out of money, 58,850 cubic yards later.

The second excavation attempt began on November 1st. This time, water would be mixed with crushed rock to curb the spread of the fire. Uncharacteristically cold weather froze the water pipes. Funding ran out on March 15, 1963 after spending $42,420.

The city scrapped a third excavation plan, and by April 11, 1963 the mine fire had spread 700 feet from its origin.