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Hey, he's donors. Welcome back to Keystone State of Mind. It's me, Steph, Your tour guide to the dark side of Pennsylvania. I am super excited this week because the show has almost reached 1000 downloads total. This is Episode 13. So I think that's pretty good for just starting out and being an amateur and not knowing what the hell I was doing from day one. So I'm really proud and humbled at how much the show has grown. And I just want to say thank you to everybody for helping me get to this point. I couldn't have done it without every single one of my listeners through my pad hosting service that I use. They give me stats up today up to the minute stats that I can check out. And one of these types of stats I see is listener locations. And I'm also super proud to announce that the show has listeners and 14 countries and 35 states. That is pretty exciting. So when I see all these listener locations, I am super curious to know who all these people are. So what I'm gonna do each week isn't gonna shout out one of these cities that has chaos. So I'm listeners. And if you're from that city, I want you to reach out and tell me about yourself and tell me about where you live. And the first place that I chose is Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. So if you live in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, this week, I want you to reach out and tell me all about you. Why you like to show something you might want to hear on an upcoming episode. Tell me anything you want. I just want to hear from you. I want to put some names to these stats that I'm getting. I also want to shout out the members of the chaos. So am keys donors, Facebook Group. You guys keep me going when I'm feeling discouraged or can't get the motivation to research an episode. I get a little nudge from my key stoners there, and I really need it, and I really appreciate it. So thank you guys so much. There's 103 members now, if you want to join at Super Easy, just go to the chaos om Facebook page. It's under Keystone State of Mind, and you can join the group from there. That's where I pose most of the updates. I tried to do it on the other. Social media isn't on Snapchat, but I don't know, terrible that that stuff so but that's where I put all the updates, and I put a really cool went up today. Actually, I now have the hook up for Keystone State of Mind coffee mugs, so those are available for purchase if anyone's interested. Um, if I see some interest for the coffee mugs, I will set up some kind of purchasing system. Haven't really looked into it too hard yet, cause I don't know. Are you guys gonna want the coffee mugs? I don't know. So if you're interested in he's don't State of Mind coffee mugs let me know into chaos. So am he's donors group. I have a great big thank you to Aubrey, who left the show of five star rating and a positive review on Apple podcasts. As you know, as I've been spouting off every week about that, those ratings and reviews helped the show to grow and reach new listeners through the apple podcast app. So thank you so much, Aubrey. I got a lot of great feedback on last week's show. What a weird one, right? This week's show isn't going to be quite a strange, but it's definitely just is interesting, and it's gonna make you on a face palm a couple of times. There's really nothing graphic or gory a gross. I don't really have to put out any content warnings. There's nothing controversial or anything like that. But it is a crazy story, and it's kind of pertinent right now because this town that we're talking about has been in the news lately. This is also going to be a two part episode, so you'll get part one this week, Part two next week. I'll do my best to get it out as early as I can. Let's find out all about it right after I get into a Keystone state of mind. As always, I'll be enjoying an ice cold can of Keystone late on this lovely Wednesday afternoon. No, on May 7th, 1962 the Town Council for Centralia, Pennsylvania, made a decision that would ultimately lead to the destruction of the town. They started a fire that continues to burn till his day. I'm not being metaphorical. I'm talking about a literal fire. This fire has been burning for nearly 58 years. How could something like this happen? Well, let's go back to May 7th, 1962 and find out that Town Council meeting wasn't special. It wasn't much different than any other town council meeting. This was a pretty small village. There wasn't a whole lot to talk about. The main thing on the docket was the upcoming Memorial Day holiday and the celebrations that would go on in Centralia. The council members wanted to make sure that the town looked nice. Memorial Day was a big deal. In Centralia, there were two large cemeteries that held veterans of wars from the Civil War. On it was a day to honor their fallen soldiers and their phone loved ones, and it was also a day of celebration. There would be parades and games and things for the kids to do, food to eat. It was just a good time to be had by all. Generally, as Memorial Day celebrations go anywhere, the main concern was cleaning up the town's newly established landfill. The landfill had just opened a few months earlier. In 1962 but must be. They acquired quite a bit of garbage because the town council was concerned with cleaning it up. The landfill was in close proximity to the odd fellow cemetery, one of the two large cemeteries in town where these memorial services were to be held on May 30th. The town had repurposed an old abandoned strip mine. They excavated it all out and used that for the town's new dump. And I think this was a fairly common thing to do with these abandoned strip mines. What else are you going to do with them? The jump was 300 feet long, 75 feet wide and 50 feet deep. You guys know how I don't do very well with dimension, so I had to compare her best to something. So 300 feet is about the length of a football field minus the end zones. Ah, this American football to my European listeners. So it wasn't terribly big. I guess it just filled up fast, and they wanted to clean this thing out. At the town council meeting, it is speculated that the council members decided they were going to burn the trash in the landfill. Now I say that it was speculated because it wasn't written down in the meeting minutes, and there's a reason for that. Prior to this era, the practice of burning trash and landfills was pretty common. But the dangers of this had started coming toe late in the late fifties, early sixties, and certain regulations have been placed on doing this. It wasn't exactly illegal, but it also was definitely not recommended. So when the town chose to do this, they did not put it on paper. This was especially dangerous in Centralia because this little village is located in the heart of the anther site coal region of Pennsylvania and the Appalachian Mountains. So here I have to take a little detour from the story to talk about the history of Centralia and the significance of cool not only in Centralia but in Pennsylvania. That topic could really be its own episode in itself, so I am just going to skim over it, give you a little more insight into Cole and how it works. So cool is created when plant and vegetative matter are compressed beneath the earth's surface under high pressure and temperature. This process takes millions of years. Now there are four ranks of coal. Anthro site is the highest rank. It is the most mature it's been forming for the longest amount of time. It has the highest quality vegetative matter, and in turn it puts out the highest quality energy and heat. But this high quality material is the deepest cool that there is. So it's the hardest to mine as well below anther site. There is by two minutes cool, and that's, Ah, middle rank. It is still very useful. It's just not the highest quality below that are sub by two minutes and lignite coal. Those two are terms I've never even heard of. I don't know how useful those two types of cool are. I am far from an Earth scientist, so hopefully I described that correctly. If not, there's a coal expert out there. Tell me how I got it wrong. This region of Pennsylvania, where Centralia is located, has the highest concentration of anther site coal anywhere in the world. This topic is fascinating to me, so definitely coal and coal mining are going on the list of topics that I'm going to cover on the show. One of these days. Andruzzi Cole was first discovered in the mid 17 hundreds in Pennsylvania. The first answer site, Coal Mine, was opened in 17 75 and quickly, coal mining became the biggest industry in Pennsylvania. Centralia is right in the center of the anther site Coal Region, hence its name, Centralia. But a funny thing was when the town was first incorporated in the mid 18 fifties, they tried to name the town Centerville, but there was already a Centerville in this area of Pennsylvania, so they had a change of Centralia. Not important, but just a fun little tidbit. There were quite a few coal mines in Centralia, run mainly by two large coal mining companies. The maximum population that centrally ever reached was in 18 90 that was 2761 people, so still quite a small town and a total mining town. The coal industry boomed in Pennsylvania up until about the time of the Great Depression, and that's where it started to taper off for a couple of different reasons. One is that it was so much cheaper to mind by two minutes coal. The people started using that instead, it didn't have the same power is anther site coal, but because it was cheaper to mine, it was cheaper to buy, and they would just use more of it. And it would equal out, or maybe be even more economical than using answer site. Another reason why the answer cycle market fell off is because technology was changing and petroleum was becoming more accessible. Petroleum refinement techniques were making leaps and bounds, and there were more uses for gasolines. A. Than there were fickle. So by 1962 there were still coal mines in Centralia. There were still coal companies in Centralia, but it wasn't the booming industry that it had been 50 60 70 years before. Okay, so now we're back to May of 1962. The town Council allegedly planned on having a controlled burn at the landfill in an effort to clean up the town for Memorial Day on May 27th the Fire Department was dispatched to the landfill to carry out this controlled burn, and based on the meeting minutes from the next Town council meeting in June, these firemen were paid $6 to carry out this task. And that's basically how We know that the council decided on this controlled burn because like I said, they didn't put anything on paper in the May meeting. But the June meeting they had to account for this money that had been spent. And it shows that it had been paid to the fireman on May 27th when they were at the landfill. So we can put two and two together. That's what happened. So the Fire Department spent the day of May 27th at the landfill burning the trash down, getting it ready for the celebrations on the 30th. I don't know why they would wait until three days before. That's really dumb. They could have planned it for any time between the seventh and the 27th but they wait till three days before the big party on the 27th. The fireman thought it was out. No big deal. Same thing they'd probably done times before. But the fire re surfaced on May 29th. So the day before the party, so now they're scrambling around trying to put this fire out again. As far as I can tell, the Memorial Day celebrations went off without a hitch. There was no concern with the fire on that day, but by the time the June council meeting came around, it was becoming apparent that this was a problem. So what? The council meeting, a resident of Centralia named Clearance Cashner offered to use his steam shovel and he would dig out all the burning material for $175. At this time, it's believed that it was still just the trash that was burning, so it really would have been pretty easy undertaking to put the fire out. But the council rejected it. They didn't flat out rejected. They just basically said, Well, you know, this has to go through channels. We can't just approve this right now and kind of swept it under the rug. I'm going to call this the third really bad decision on the part of the Centralia Town Council. First bad decision is having the fire to begin with. Second, bad decision is having it three days before the party didn't turn out to be a problem, but I could have so rejecting this guy's offer to put the fire out for $175 3rd bad decision these guys didn't just sit around with their thumbs up their ass. They did try to put it out. You know, the fire department would go down there and try to put it out using water. They did do some kind of small excavating projects. Be prepared for me to continuously stumble over the word excavating because for some reason, that just does not want to come out of my mouth properly today. But anyways, when they dug up that landfill, they found that there was a crack that led right down in to the coal vein beneath this crack in the earth that leads down to a coal vein is called a subsided since by the end of summer 1962 this fire was still burning, and the Centralia Town council knew they were in a world of shit. And they had to come up with a plan because now they needed help there beyond the point of managing this on their own. So they set a letter to the Pennsylvania Department of Mines and Mineral Industries. And in this letter, they claimed the fire started on or around June 25th. This is a straight up lie and This letter was signed by the mayor and members of the Town Council. And also in this letter, the Town Council estimated that the cost to put the fire out was now $30,000. So in two months, the cost went from $175 that they could have just paid right up front and handled the issue. Now it's gonna cost $30,000 because a massive excavation effort would have to be undertaken to extinguish the fire all the way. The Department of Mining and Mineral Industries, or D mm, I as I'm gonna call it from now on, they didn't act right away. But are you surprised they're bureaucracy? That letter probably set on somebody's desk covered in jelly doughnut for four months before anybody even read it. It would be almost a year before Centralia got a response from the D. M. I. In the meantime, though, private contractors from around the area were offering to do this work for free to excavate the mine and put out the fire for free. What they wanted in return was the rights toe, all the cool that they unearthed during the process. But the mine owners were not having that. So all of these plans were rejected as well. By the time Centralia got a response from the D. M. I the first thing they said Waas they would not allow exploratory drilling because now they don't know how far this fire has traveled. You know, it's been a year. No one knows how far the fire has traveled. So any contractors who would be willing to do the work want to do exploratory drilling drill boreholes to see how far the fire has moved, and then they can assess what needs to be done. But the d. M m. I refused to let anyone do any just, uh, exploratory drilling. I'd like to assume that the d. M. I had a reason for prohibiting that. I'd like to believe that it wasn't just some arbitrary decision just to be a pain in the ass, but I don't know. I don't know why they wouldn't allow it. In July of 1963 three different plans were submitted to the D. M. M. I plan a would be a trench dug around the entire fire and then filled in with in combustible materials to isolate the fire and keep it from spreading any further, because at this point, the fire is still kind of on the outskirts of town. It's not coming close to any homes yet. The Onley thing in real danger is the ad fellow cemetery, which, of course, that's a big deal to, but not like it would be for homes of living people. You know this plan Plan A would cost $275,000. Plan B was to build a much smaller trench on one end of the fire, feel that within combustible material, and fight the other side of the fire with flushing of water. That plan would cost $150,000 and Plan C was just flushing. Drilling bore holes and barrage ing the fire with water, and that would cost $82,000. The D. M. I rejected all three. What they offered was $40,000 but they would not be able to give it to Centralia until October of 1963. So now, by the time they get that $40,000 the fire has been burning for almost 18 months, and they really couldn't do any of the projects that they had laid out with that amount of money. So what they ended up doing was digging boreholes strategically throughout the town. And then they would pump fly ash down into the boreholes into the minds to try to create a barrier fly. Ash is the remnants of what's left over when coal is burned, so it's basically like cool ashes. This may have slowed down the spread of the fire, but it certainly didn't stop it. By the spring of 1965 more subside. Ince's had opened, and there was a visible glow at night time around the landfill. That's how near to the surface that the fire had come for years. The town of Centralia would just continually pump fly ash and water into these boreholes just to maintain the area that the flames were spreading. Teoh trying to keep them away from the homes in the center of town. Now here's the thing about a mind fire Anthracite. Coal is notoriously hard to get lit, but once it is aflame is notoriously hard to put out. The Onley thing that's gonna put it out is a lack of oxygen or a lack of fuel, a k a. More coal. I can attest to this. I heat my home with a coal burning stove. If I let the fire go out is almost impossible to get it started again. You could hold a lighter to it for an hour. It's never gonna like you could hold a torch to it. Not gonna light. The only thing that I can use to relight my coal stove is it's virtually gunpowder. You can buy these little cool starters, they're called, and it's just a little packet of gunpowder. It has to burn that hot for the coal to get started, but once it's lit, it takes so such a small amount of coal to heat my house. If you're unfamiliar way the coal stove. It's just a tiny little the size of like a measuring cup, like a one cup measuring cup. And that little bit of Colin there will heat my entire house. That's how hot it burns, and I could spray it with a fire hose. It's not going out. The only way it's going to go out is if I let the cool run out of the hopper. But in a mind fire. The heat spreads faster than the flames, so when that 200 degree heat spreads down the mind further, it dries out the coal that's ahead of the flames. Enough so that it's easier to light and the heat evaporates. Any water applied to it before that water can do anything to the burning coal embers. So the residents of Centralia are seeing this continuous work done to the fire, and they're thinking, Okay, we're you know, we're gonna be all right. They're gonna maintain this until it runs out of oxygen or runs out of fuel and the fire will go out and they kind of ignored it for like, 15 years. It wasn't until 1977 that thing's really started getting bad for the residents of Centralia. By this time, the fire had spread underneath the residential areas of town, and the fly ash barrier had a catastrophic breach that now was allowing toxic gases to seep up through those boreholes and even through the ground. Burning coal releases many gases, but the most detrimental to humans is carbon monoxide. Carbon dioxide is odorless, colorless. You won't even notice it until you're starting to feel the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning. And that's what was beginning to happen to some of the residents of Centralia. Things like headaches, irritability, dizziness, weakness, impaired vision, ataxia, nausea, vomiting, an unconsciousness. People were reporting that they were falling asleep in front of the TV, even though they weren't tired, but they weren't really fallen asleep. They were passing out. The residents began speaking out to their state representatives, saying, We need help. Something is wrong here and no one is helping us. Things were starting to get really bad in Centralia. So in 1978 10 carbon monoxide detectors were distributed throughout the town. But of course, there were more than 10 families. There were more than 10 households, so guess what they had to dio. They had to share them. One household would get for 30 days, and then they'd have to give it to the next household. You gotta be shitting me with us. This is one of them face palm moments I'm talking about. Nowadays, we can all just goto lows or Walmart and buy ourselves a carbon monoxide detector for 50 bucks or whatever and put it up in our home. But in the seventies. These were big machines and they cost $2000 each. So the state was being pretty fucking stingy and only gave him 10. Centralia residents were relieved when, in 1979 a new governor was elected and they thought, Now, maybe that you get some help. You guys are never gonna believe who pops up in this story. That's right, Governor Thorn. Dick bag. Of course. I mean Dick Thornburgh. So when Thorne dick bag was elected, residents at Centralia started bombarding him with letters and asking for help and thinking that, you know, new guy in office, He's gonna do something for us here. But no surprise. He lived up to his nickname. That I gave him an was a total dick bag. He completely ignored all of these letters from Centralia. But I gotta give him a little past because in 1979 in his first year in office was the three Mile island nuclear disaster in Pennsylvania. So he kind of did have his hands full. I suppose I can let him slide a little bit. I am usually pretty harsh on Thorn Dick bag here on Ksor in December of 1979 the first business closed due to the fire. This was Coddington service Station. Jon Coddington had one spend the mayor of Centralia, and his service station had been there for decades. He started noticing the smell of methane coming up through the basement office service station. And when he was monitoring the temperature of the gasoline that came out of his underground tanks in early December, it was 57 F. Gasoline I gas is supposed to be capped at 50 degrees fair night. So 57 wasn't a huge problem, but within a week it jumped up to nearly 70 degrees, and that is a fire hazard. So he was forced to drain his tanks and closed his store. F Y I Gasoline boils at 194 F. Just another little fun tidbit for you. By 1980 life in Centralia was really becoming unbearable for the residents. They had to keep their windows open all year long because the toxic gases were leaking up through their cellars into their homes. They were sharing these carbon monoxide monitors, so if they didn't have one at the time, well, too bad for them. I guess, right? Some people started believing that this was a conspiracy, that the powers that be were allowing this fire to burn, to get everybody out of Centralia so that whoever could take control of all of the anther site coal beneath the town. Then of course, was false. But the truth wasn't that much better. They were just being ignored completely. It's a small town with, like, 1700 residents, and nobody gives a shit. Now, Governor Thornburgh, I do have to use his real name once in a while. Governor Thornburgh was not completely oblivious to this, although he seemed to give, like, less than half a ship. But he did appoint a man named Do It Smith off the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency fema p e m a. To do some studies to check it out. But Thornburg believed that the bill should fall on the federal government. The Office of Surface Mining, The OS um, this is a federal agency that's part of the Department of the Interior. So whatever do it, Smith found, was just going to be forwarded to the O. S. M Thornburg. Wasn't that concerned about it at all? Cool. Let's just adds more bureaucracy to this whole bullshit that ought to help. The townspeople feared that somebody was gonna have to die before the city, the county, the state would take action. And they weren't that far off to near deadly incidents occurred in 1981 that made people start to really take notice. This is where I'm going to stab for part one. I gotta leave you out a little bit of a cliffhanger, Right? Come back next week for the conclusion of this n Trillium mind fire story. And for some more fun with me and chaos. Owen, I hope everybody out there is healthy and safe and staying sane during quarantine. I know I'm losing it a little bit. If you're bored, you can always talk to me. Your tour guide to the dark side. You can get me on Facebook. He's own state of mind. Or join the chaos. So I'm keys. Donors, Facebook group in screaming Twitter, Keystone State of Mind Snapchat Keystone. Underscore the pod. Or you can email me stuff at Castle Lamb, the pod dot com Check out the mugs, the new chaos om coffee mugs in the castle. I'm keys donors, Facebook Group. Tell me what you think about those and whatever you're doing out there. Just stay, Keystone, my friends.