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Centralia, Pa. - How an underground coal fire erased a town
If officials in Pennsylvania's capital, Harrisburg, have their way, the borough of Centralia, Pa., will soon cease to exist.
There's not much left of the northeastern Pennsylvania coal town these days. Even in the early 1980s, some two decades after the underground fires began, more than a thousand people called Centralia home. But as the poisonous gases continued to seep from fissures in the ground, and as the sudden sinkholes threatened to cast people into the smoldering depths, the town emptied out.
Today, fewer than a dozen people remain.
Now the state wants those last holdouts gone. As the Associated Press's Michael Rubinkam reports, state officials have ordered Centralia's remaining residents to leave so that their homes can be demolished.