The Fire Down Below : The mine has smoldered 30 years, choking the vitality out of Centralia. But the last residents won’t leave; their story says much about life in coal country.

CENTRALIA, Pa. —  At first, most folks in this flyspeck of a town didn’t pay the fire any mind. It was about noon, and Mary Lou Gaughan remembers that she was scrubbing her front porch when a young boy shouted that a garbage dump near the cemetery was ablaze.

“I figured it was a trash fire that burned into the old coal mine, but Lord knows, there are so many underground coal fires around here,” Gaughan recalls. “It’s a way of life for us in the hills, and we all felt this one would just burn itself out in time.”

Today, 30 years later, the Centralia mine fire still burns.

Smoldering under 400 acres and belching smoke into the air, it has all but destroyed the little town that sits on one of the richest coal seams in the United States. It has forced more than 1,000 residents to flee their homes, leaving behind an eerie outpost of grassy fields and deserted streets high in the blackened hills of northeastern Pennsylvania.

But a handful of die-hards remain. Gaughan and 59 other residents refuse to leave, determined to ignore the blaze that has become an environmental disaster. They’re tired of being pushed around, they don’t think the fire threatens their lives and they’ll be damned if government lawyers are going to shut down a town that just celebrated its 125th anniversary.

“If one of them fellas comes here and tells me I have to move because of the fire, I know what I’ll say,” says Maude Howey, who just turned 95. “I’ll say, ‘I was born and raised in this house, Sonny, and you’re so full of crap, your hat don’t fit.’ ”

This is a story about bureaucratic bungling and grass-roots grit. If and when Centralia disappears, it might become just another historical footnote. But to those who know it firsthand, the isolated town’s struggle to put out the fire and retain its identity says much about life, death and memory in the kingdom of coal.

No one symbolizes the struggle better than Howey, whose father was town constable in the 19th Century. Frail but feisty, the white-haired woman has lived in the same house since 1897 and isn’t about to move. She’s seen it all--families divided and marriages shattered by the controversy--and still hangs on. Why leave home because of a crazy fire that started in 1962?

“I’m not going,” Howey says flatly. “If they bulldoze my house, they’ll have to bulldoze me.”

It may come to that. State officials warned the town’s citizens two months ago that if they didn’t leave their homes and accept generous compensation, the government would seize the 36 remaining structures through eminent domain. There was no chance of putting out the underground fire, they said, and the community would have to close.

That was bad enough. But then disaster experts met with residents, many of them elderly, and repeated the old warnings: The Centralia mine fire could spread over 3,400 acres. It would cost $600 million to smother the blaze, which might burn for another 100 years. And even though the fire might not be burning directly under the town, it could change direction at any time, filling homes with deadly carbon monoxide. It was time to leave.

In Centralia, where blunt talk seems to be a genetic trait, folks had a quick response:

“You’re all quacks!” shouted 74-year-old George Lokitis, a burly man who worked in the mines for 25 years and has black lung disease. “What you’re doing is like Hitler or Stalin!”

“Leave us alone!” snapped Councilwoman Helen Womer. “This program is a fraud!”

“Sounds like a phony story to me,” added Lamar Mervine, another native son.

The plot thickened last week when the council passed a defiant ordinance: If Pennsylvania was going to buy off residents, it also would have to compensate them for the mineral rights underneath Centralia, including a rich vein of anthracite--or hard coal--said to be worth millions. Did the state want their homes that badly?

“We’ve decided to fight fire with fire,” says Mayor Anne Marie Devine, who took on the $20-a-week job after the city’s previous mayor sold his home and left. “I don’t think these people really know what they’re up against here. We’re not moving.”

It adds up to a giant headache for state officials, who spent years trying to put out the fire. As the Battle of Centralia heads into its final act, the mood is turning ugly.

“I understand that people want to live on in the homes of their grandfathers,” says Jack Carling, a state disaster programs director. “But we have to tell these people that the show is over.”

For most Centralians, the show ended eight years ago, when they voted 345 to 200 to leave their homes and accept a $42-million buyout plan approved by Congress. It was a wrenching decision for many residents. Yet it was also a testimonial to citizen action: The buyout was the largest ever approved for a coal mining disaster and only came about through years of grass-roots lobbying.

By 1987, the wrecker’s ball was a common sight, and most of Centralia’s row houses, taverns and shops were destroyed. The Little League team disbanded, the American Legion hall was knocked down and the town’s festive church picnics became a thing of the past.

These days, motorists speeding down Route 61 could miss the place entirely if they didn’t look out for the few buildings that remain. Once a busy mining center filled with Irish, German and Slavic families, Centralia now looks like something out of a “Twilight Zone” episode.

At noon, there are few people in the streets, and the only sounds are of delivery trucks rumbling to the next city. Hungry travelers can’t buy a sandwich, and there’s no pay phone in sight. The post office boarded up most mailboxes long ago.

If there’s a landmark, it’s one that most residents would like to forget. On a hill near the cemetery, a series of rusting smokestacks pump smoke from the underground fire. The wisps swirl over the hilltop and then vanish over the silent town.

“Coming here is like entering a land of slow motion,” says Joe Mercuri, who began working in Centralia’s tiny post office two weeks ago. “You walk out on the street, and there’s nobody. You find yourself asking, where is everybody? It’s not like your normal place.”

Normalcy, however, is in the eye of the beholder. To those who remain, Centralia is more a cherished state of mind than a painful question mark.

“This was quite a town, because everybody knew everybody else, and they’d help you out,” says Molly Darrah, 67, who lives in the house where she was born and raised. “I miss the people more than anything, because the fire has destroyed more than just a place. It took our town away from us, and you can’t put a price tag on a home if it’s a real home.”

How and when did the fire start? No two Centralians tell the same story.

Mary Lou Gaughan swears it was on Good Friday in April, 1962. George Lokitis insists the blaze began in early May of that year. Darrah pegs it to sometime later that month.

David DeKok, who has written a history of the disaster, says it started on May 27, when town officials set fire to a garbage dump near the cemetery. It was a common yet illegal way to clear the area of debris, and firemen typically doused the blaze after it burned off the garbage. Usually there was no problem. But the Centralia fire kept smoldering.

Once it reached down into the mine, through a series of openings on the surface, the blaze began spreading rapidly through the coal seam. Most mine fires die because they run out of room to burn. But the Centralia mine is a maze of long, meandering tunnels, stretching in many directions. The fire ignited quickly in a burst of orange, blue and yellow flames, with temperatures exceeding 1,000 degrees at the heart of the inferno.

Soon, residents began complaining about rotten, sulfuric odors drifting up from the dump--a byproduct of the fiercely burning anthracite. The conflagration had begun, but it didn’t create an air of panic. No one dreamed that the coal mine, which opened in 1856 and helped Centralia thrive, might destroy it a century later.

“They could have put this fire out in a week if they had known what to do, if they really cared about doing the job right,” says Lokitis. “But nobody ever did.”

City officials realized that something had to be done. But how? And who would do the work? Was it the city’s responsibility, or the county’s? Should the state take on the job, or the federal government? The question was hotly debated for nearly two decades, after the mine closed in 1962.

There were studies conducted and conflicting estimates about the money needed. Politicians urged patience. At one point, bore holes were dug to measure the fire’s temperature, but that only worsened the blaze by allowing more oxygen into the mine.

Later, an underground barrier was built to keep the blaze from spreading. But soon residents were compelled to put gas monitors in their homes, to check for dangerous levels of carbon monoxide. Some folks suffered severe respiratory problems from the fumes, while others reported waves of nausea and splitting headaches.

In 1969, three families were driven from homes that had been infiltrated by deadly fumes. In 1980, 27 more families fled. The Centralia fire attracted national attention the next year, when 12-year-old Todd Domboski fell into a concealed hole near the original site of the disturbance. He was pulled to safety after clinging frantically to roots and vines near the surface of the 150-foot pit.

“People always kept coming up with one idea or another to put out the fire, but it was always a day late and a dollar short,” says Mayor Devine. “Nobody ever treated this like a real priority. We’ve been lied to so much, and this is our government we’re talking about.”

State officials tell a different story, suggesting that all levels of government got involved and spent upward of $7 million on one failed scheme after another.

“This is something that the state and the federal government just didn’t know how to approach,” says Joe Larish, who works with the county redevelopment agency, which has been buying up the remaining homes in Centralia. “It’s been a sad, sad story all around. Some days, the smell in town is just terrible.”

Fed up with the worsening fire, a group of citizens began prodding the federal government to do something in the early 1980s. After tough lobbying, they got results when Congress freed up the $42 million in 1983 to finance property buyouts. But not all Centralians were ready to move.

Indeed, some felt there was a conspiracy by some individuals to reopen the coal mines and make a fortune. Others said the fire dangers were overstated. Tempers flared and longtime friendships were ruined amid a stormy argument over what was best for Centralia.

Those wounds still bleed. During last week’s council meeting, Leon Jurgill Jr. urged lawmakers to include former Centralians like him in the ordinance demanding money for the town’s mineral rights. But he got a cold shoulder from Councilwoman Womer.

“You relocated voluntarily in 1984,” she told Jurgill. “Mary Lou (Gaughan) and I have been involved in this for 23 years. We never gave up. We went through living hell. Those who stayed, stayed with a commitment. You have to understand that.”

Jurgill shot back that at the time he had no choice. His house had been overcome with fumes, and he had feared for his infant daughter and pregnant wife. The stress was so intense that his marriage soon ended. It was a depressing story, but the council held firm: Jurgill had left. The others stayed.

“This is a war that goes on forever,” Jurgill said wearily as the meeting ended. “Some people don’t forget, but they should remember the good things about Centralia.”

For Molly Darrah, it’s a full-time job. Centralia is the only home she’s ever known, and she bubbles with excitement when a visitor asks about the town. A friendly woman who speaks in a lilting Irish accent, Darrah shows snapshots of her recent trip to Dublin but swears that her heart swelled with pride when she returned to Centralia nine days later.

In recent years, her close friends have moved away in droves, and some left their front-door keys with her as a memento. She’s put them in a tin candy box for safekeeping and plans to attach the friend’s name to each key. Who knows? Maybe one day they’ll return.

Darrah seems lost in thought, but then a loud meowing jerks her back to reality. These days, she’s taking care of 16 lonesome cats abandoned when their owners left town.

“I’m no cat lover,” she says. “But you know, it’s not their fault they were left behind. And maybe they want to stay. Sure as you’re born, they should be looked after.”