A Pennsylvania Town Has Sat Above a Coal Fire for 63 Years — and Only 5 Residents Refused to Leave

As of April 2026, a fire has been burning beneath Centralia, Pennsylvania for exactly 63 years and 11 months — and there is no credible timeline for it ending. The borough, situated in Columbia County in Northeastern Pennsylvania, once housed a population of approximately 1,000 people as recently as 1980. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 count, that number has fallen to five. The streets are mostly gone. The homes are mostly demolished. And the coal seam beneath the ground continues to smolder across an estimated 3,700 acres of underground terrain.

Centralia is not an abstraction or a historical footnote. It is a legally recognized borough in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, with a ZIP code (17927) that the U.S. Postal Service officially discontinued in 2002. The physical site is accessible by car, roughly 100 miles northwest of Philadelphia and about 120 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. Visitors arrive regularly, drawn by a combination of geological curiosity, dark tourism, and the borough’s well-documented connection to the fictional town of Silent Hill in the 2006 horror film of the same name.

How the Fire Started — and Why It Never Stopped

The fire is widely traced to May 1962, when a trash burning operation near the Odd Fellows Cemetery — a standard disposal method at the time — ignited an exposed coal seam. According to the Christian Science Monitor, early attempts to extinguish the blaze were inadequate, and the fire spread into the labyrinthine network of underground mine tunnels that honeycomb the region beneath the borough.

Coal seam fires are among the most difficult fires on earth to extinguish. They require no surface oxygen to sustain themselves, feeding instead on carbon trapped in the seam itself. Once they travel into tunnels and fissures, conventional firefighting methods — water, foam, smothering — become effectively useless. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has conducted multiple intervention attempts over the decades, including a major excavation effort in the 1980s, but none succeeded in fully containing the blaze.

According to All That’s Interesting, geological assessments have estimated the fire could continue burning for upward of 250 years given the volume of coal still present in the seam. The DEP monitors the fire’s progress but has not announced any active extinguishment program as of early 2026.

The Population Collapse: From 1,000 to Five in Four Decades

The human cost of the fire unfolded over roughly two decades after the blaze began. For most of the 1960s and 1970s, residents were largely unaware of the scale of the danger beneath them. Carbon monoxide levels in homes began rising during the late 1970s, and in February 1981, a sinkhole opened beneath a residential backyard on Locust Avenue, swallowing 12-year-old Todd Domboski nearly 150 feet before a cousin pulled him out.

That incident accelerated federal and state action. Congress appropriated approximately $42 million for a voluntary relocation program in 1984, according to reporting by the Christian Science Monitor. The majority of Centralia’s roughly 1,000 residents accepted buyouts and left. By 1990, the population had dropped to around 63. By 2000, it stood at 21. The 2020 Census recorded five.