In May 1962, the borough of Centralia burned trash to clean up a local landfill before Memorial Day, but the fire spread into abandoned coal mines beneath the town: More than 60 years later, it’s still burning

What began as a routine pre-Memorial Day cleanup became one of America’s longest-running environmental disasters. In May 1962, officials in the small Pennsylvania town of Centralia ignited a landfill in an abandoned strip-mining pit to reduce accumulated trash, a common practice at the time. Instead of burning out, the flames reached the exposed Buck Mountain anthracite coal seam, igniting an underground fire that spread through a network of abandoned mine tunnels beneath the town. More than six decades later, the fire is still burning, making Centralia one of the world’s best-known examples of an uncontrolled underground coal fire.

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