The really remarkable thing about Centralia is not that the fire has been able to burn for so long, it’s that the town, the state, and the federal government spent twenty-two years trying to put it out, and failed.

The fire didn’t start under the town itself, and for a while nobody thought it’d ever go unchecked long enough to reach it. The book Fire Underground by David DeKok is a thorough account of the origins of the fire and the many attempts to end it. It’s a horror story of bureaucratic infighting and inaction that would deliver a Silicon Valley libertarian into anaphylactic shock.

Almost every attempt to suppress the fire followed the same pattern. After months of studying the location and severity of the fire, the government agency responsible would make a list of options and pick the cheapest one. Typically, that would be installing an underground barrier in the path of the fire or flushing the mines with a mixture of rock and water. Those were never thought to be more effective than, for example, total excavation or digging a trench ahead of the fire to prevent its spread, but affordability was the priority. A few private citizens like Quint from Jaws (“You all know me… you know how I earn a living”) occasionally offered to solve the problem, asking only to keep the coal that they find, but were turned away by the bureaucracy just as Quint surely would have been in real life.

Once a solution was chosen, the agency would tender for a contractor and work would commence. And then, the project would simply run out of money, or prove ineffective, or it would be discovered that the fire had already grown past the point where the specific project was designed to contain it. Years later, the agency would seemingly forget they ever did anything in the first place, and respond to Centralians’ anguish with fresh calls to study the fire. Eventually, the fire itself reached the town.

Nothing improved once the problem was elevated to the federal level, where the Centralia fire fell into an ouroboros of buck-passing. The United States Bureau of Mines and the Office of Surface Mining, two agencies within the Department of the Interior, shared responsibility for solving Centralia and feuded intensely almost for decades. Like the Montagues and the Capulets, only loveless, and also very boring.

In some cases, the government actually made things worse: like filling in open pits that had been venting the fire, channelling carbon monoxide towards, and into, residents’ homes. There was not enough government cash to get carbon monoxide detectors for everyone, so families had to share with one another, or go on waiting lists. It didn’t particularly bother the government when residents started passing out. After some Centralians started advocating for relocation, federal agencies blamed them for undermining their efforts.

The two agencies delayed effective intervention long enough for federal involvement to be suspended completely by Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior James Watt. Watt had a dogmatic fervour for terminating federal funding of anything, which extended to banning a free Beach Boys concert at the National Mall. He also, DeKok writes, had a “trademark cowboy hat.”

Some in Centralia began to suspect conspiracy: it was more plausible, they thought, that state and federal governments were colluding to drive residents out so they could seize the town’s valuable anthracite. In truth, the Centralia fire was never impossible or even that hard to put out, just expensive. By 1981, writes DeKok, the fire had grown so much that trying to extinguish it just by pouring water into the mines would take twenty years of non-stop pumping. But at any stage of difficulty, nobody in government, or in Centralia, thought that they should be the ones to spend money on it. The town of Centralia was simply not politically nor economically valuable enough to get a fire put out.

“For years, government lied to us in Centralia. They lied to us.”

“Government lies through its teeth,” former resident Tom Larkin said in the 2007 documentary The Town That Was. “I don’t trust government. And I have good reason not to. Because for years government lied to us in Centralia. They lied to us.” There is evidence to suggest that this is true. To defend its inaction, the Pennsylvania Department of Health denied to the press that there was any public health problem in Centralia. This while withholding from residents basic information on the effects of human exposure to carbon monoxide, and announcing that no carbon monoxide detector in Centralia had ever recorded “dangerous” levels of the gas — that “dangerous” level being a point beyond what their government-issued equipment was able to measure.

The Centralia problem was only ‘solved’ when ignoring it became politically embarrassing. In 1982, twelve-year-old Todd Domboski was swallowed by a sudden rift in the ground, and sucked into a pit of hot mud. He was rescued by his teenage cousin. This occurred while a congressional delegation was visiting Centralia to evaluate how much of a problem the mine fire really was, and, you know: it looked terrible.

As an end to the fire appeared increasingly less likely, a schism developed in Centralia between those who wanted to leave and those who wanted to stay. The latter group seized upon anything to avert the coming diaspora, to the point of denying that the fire or carbon monoxide posed any threat to Centralia residents, or even existed. One opponent of relocation, Helen Womer refused on principle to allow carbon monoxide detectors in her home. After his incident, Domboski says Womer warned him not to talk to reporters. And around that time, an anonymous broadsheet circulated in Centralia denouncing Domboski as a dull boy who spent all day indoors when he wasn’t running his mouth in front of the TV cameras. Larkin, who advocated relocation, said he got death threats. Another advocate had a Molotov cocktail thrown into his motorcycle shop. There are Centralians who lived through this period who do not speak to each other today.

All official efforts to extinguish the Centralia mine fire ceased in 1984. Centralia was surrendered to the path of the fire, and a congressional appropriation of $42 million provided for the relocation costs of Centralia residents. Relocation was voluntary then, and became compulsory in 1992 when Pennsylvania seized and condemned all property in Centralia under eminent domain. A few residents defied the state by refusing to leave their homes, and endured lengthy eviction battles. In 2013, the state gave up, and agreed that those people still intent on living in Centralia, all elderly by that point and technically squatters, might as well legally remain there until their death.

The five or six people still living in Centralia “are the diehards of the diehards,” David DeKok tells me. “They resent tourists of any stripe, and they are too old to know about Silent Hill. But if you told them it brings tourists to Centralia, they would hate it.”