The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town | Hacker News Reader

The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town

atlasobscura.com

85 pointspbshgthm42 comments

Mildly related: In North Philadelphia there are a few blocks known as the Logan Triangle that were abandoned once it was discovered that the topsoil was not stable.

https://hiddencityphila.org/2022/06/in-limbo-logan-triangle-...

I grew up in Pennsylvania and have visited Centralia a few times over the years. When I was younger, I remember being able to see smoke rise from the ground, but in recent years, I haven’t seen anything almost as if the fire has subsided a bit.

Pennsylvania is filled with old coal mining towns, and most of them are in a state of decay. Towns like Pottsville, Pennsylvania have buildings crumbling down on their main streets.

If anything, I think Centralia is representative of where these other towns could be in 50 to 100 years, assuming people move to larger communities. Barring the fire under the ground, of course.

It turns out basing entire economies off of resource extraction isn't sustainable. If only we hadn't had to re-experience this over and over again decade after decade. But I'm sure the next Republican candidates will promise more coal jobs so they will continue to be voted for and nothing will substantially change.

> Pottsville, Pennsylvania

It was founded in 1808. Not exactly sure how they was supposed to know.

It was incorporated in 1866. And do you think people in 1866 were stupid? Do you think there weren't plenty of examples of towns stood up around resource extraction which failed prior to that? Centralia had the benefit of tons of Gold Rush towns dying out before they were incorporated they had the opportunities to learn from.

Pottsville wasn't founded as a mining settlement. It was an industrial hub that built up around the nearby forge purchased by John Potts. It had a large textile industry and still has America's oldest brewery. In addition to industry it's also the local county seat, and it briefly had an NFL franchise. The industry mostly left in the late 20th century but the nearby mining continues - the coal is just sent elsewhere for use.

I was on a road trip a few months back and took a slight detour to pass through centralia, and there was enough smoke that I could see it from the road. Some local had set up a lawn chair and chained it to a tree so passers-by would know where to stop and take a peek

That's my kind of civic-mindedness.

There's some Youtuber who posts videos of driving out to these places and talking to the locals. It's pretty depressing, the closest I've seen to it is isolated towns in immediately post-Soviet eastern Europe, but without the meth problems.

> Pennsylvania is filled with old coal mining towns, and most of them are in a state of decay. Towns like Pottsville, Pennsylvania have buildings crumbling down on their main streets

And it's been going on long enough that Billy Joel even had a hit song about one over 40 years ago

I find the story of Centralia fascinating. I read through the entirety of Unseen Danger https://archive.org/details/unseendangertrag0000deko, marvelling how it went from something that could have been handled easily if there had been funding, to something that killed the entire town with heavy doses of politics along the way.

Neat read on the whole, but was fun to see how huge the author believes Estonia is:

> When Estonia, for example, became independent of the Soviet Union, some 245 million square miles of collectivist farmlands were simply abandoned.

I mean it's sort of hard to believe anything they say.

To convert that figure to a more relatable number: the surface area of the Earth is just about 197 million square miles. With such an error I'm having a hard time trusting the article content.

Technically, if you're measuring surface area, it' important to remember that the earth is not a sphere. There's a bit of a paradox measuring shorelines: the shorter your ruler, the longer it gets, because you're able to capture more complex features. Pethaps the authors took an extremely precise measurement of the surface of Estonia, counting everything down to the sinus cavities of dogs sleeping in alleys...

Area isn’t notably affected by fractal boundaries. Only perimeter is.

Can you explain this more? It seems trivial to extrude a 2d coastline along a third dimension to produce a paradoxical areal calculation corresponding precisely to the perimeter paradox...

If you extrude a coastline into a wall the wall's surface area will blow up the same way the measured perimeter does, but that;s because you've turned a boundary-length problem into the area of a different object. It still doesn't mean the country's ordinary map area becomes paradoxical, the extra boundary detail only affects a vanishingly thin strip near the edge, so the enclosed 2D area stays well behaved.

Aha, so you've misunderstood my joke entirely. We agree about the math, please reread my original comment with the understanding that I'm insinuating that the article has deviated from "ordinary map area" and is instead measuring the fractal surface area contained within Estonia's perimeter.

[now that the joke is explained, feel free to laugh]

Common enough error in the US when dealing with square meters abbreviated to sq m. Only off but a factor of 2.6 million.

But yes, it does call into question the rest of the fact checking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonia Area • Total 45,335 km2 (17,504 sq mi)

Some people are just oblivious to six orders of magnitude mistakes, and then go off about "folly, mistake, calamitous hubris, neglect, and plain stupidity" ...

Assuming this is about Harju, it seems the author read "245 million sq m" and assumed the m was miles, not metres.

So the already large 24,500 hectare farm became a ludicrous 245 million square mile multi-planetary behemoth.

Reading sq m as square miles is a surprisingly common error in the US, but usually gets caught before production or publication because the result is orders of magnitude out.

Quoted straight from the piece, as written by dude who just made one of the smallest countries around have abandoned farms larger than the whole world ...

But many people are really like this, no notion whatsoever of order of magnitude plausibility. Has to be beaten out of engineering students, but I suppose the majority of the population is untreated.

(LLMs are going to be a lot of fun too)

I always thought it was an interesting story, drove out there one day many years ago when I lived nearby. It was a dreary day, which added to the strangeness of the place.

It's an interesting place because it's not that far from other towns, and you can drive right through it on a normal, maintained road. If you turn off and drive just a minute or two it's very different though.

I visited Centralia about 20 years ago, I remember that we stopped the car on the way into town because there was a crack going all the way across the road with smoke coming out of it. But we kept walking and found a few abandoned houses and empty streets. We were too intimidated by all the scary signs to wander far off the road but took some pictures on a disposable camera and eventually returned home.

I like how the guy who is most grounded in how the government and corporations work is being presented as someone who is inexplicably yearning for the a point in history where things were at their bleakest.

With nary a comment about the intention of the company who is now buying up the land.

>Those that stayed had to go to court to defend their right to live on this abandoned land, all because they wanted to keep the mineral rights to their property. So now, people like Phil assume that the government is just waiting them out. Once they’re gone, putting out the fire will be easy enough. “They’ll take all that red hot coals, but also they’re going to get that rich anthracite coal,” he told us. “And I’m sure they’ll sell that. But are the people or the relatives going to get anything? It’s very doubtful. It’ll probably go to the federal government. Or the coal baron, maybe?”

>His voice, I noticed after a while, has a peculiar kind of nostalgia for the worst times in the world.

>so when coal company Pagnotti Enterprises bought the land in 2018

Burning garbage on top of coal mines is such a bizarre idea. What can go wrong?

so how do you put that fire out? or was "So now, people like Phil assume that the government is just waiting them out. Once they’re gone, putting out the fire will be easy enough" referring to how the locals think the government is just pretending they can't fix the problem?

You can't. The coal seam is literally smoldering.

You might be able to, however not easily like when you put out a simple structure fire.

The ground is riddled with small vents that allow oxygen in. If you were to inject a foaming agent and then flood the space you could eventually lower the temperature below the auto ignition temperature.

Might not be easy. Might not be cost effective right now.

But there is a reason that Pagnotti Enterprises bought the land and I doubt it is because they are looking at turning it into a nature reserve.

As far as I've been able to determine, Pagnotti Enterprises has owned land in that area for a very long time and has no apparent plans to mine there anytime soon. They got this new bit of land because the state renounced the right of way and sold it to the owners of the adjacent land. This wasn't a huge meaningful investment to Pagnotti, but they did get rid of the ruined road itself, probably because it was a tourist attraction and a lawyer said to get rid of it.

I'm bummed the ruined road is gone. It was surreal to see and had some beautiful graffiti.

i'm sure there are discussions around this but i wonder if there was any feasible way to harness the energy from the underground fires? turn a horrible situation into a semi-temporary "geothermal" generator!

The author keeps taking jabs at “capitalism” - but let’s be honest that this could happen in any political/economic system. This cheapens the article.

It was done deliberately in the USSR, in a process known as Underground Coal Gasification. Oxygen and steam are injected to convert the coal to syngas (CO + H2) which is brought up to the surface. This allows exploitation of coal deposits that are not suitable for conventional mining.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_coal_gasification

There's only one explicit reference to capitalism.

Also a comparison to Chernobyl (which no one would ever think they were anywhere near related.). Clearly the author wanted to communicate “something” more than the interesting takeover by nature.

I would agree that the root cause analysis of these two disasters is pretty different, and not super related to capitalism. But I don't think they were really trying to push that connection.

I mean there is this that happened in the USSRS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darvaza_gas_crater so indeed it happens in socialist/communist countries too.

"What Flynn makes clear is that while we tend to think of human activity on the landscape as not only damaging but irreversible, this may not always be the case."

This is pretty obvious if you've ever watched what happens to abandoned property over a few years once nobody is maintaining it. First grass and weeds, then brambles, then trees. If it's covered in asphalt or concrete it takes longer but it still happens.

It does't happen nearly as fast in the desert.

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