Posted on 03/09/2010 5:39:41 PM PST by JoeProBono
ALLENTOWN, Pa. — The few remaining residents of a Pennsylvania coal town decimated by a 48-year-old underground mine fire claim in court papers that a "massive fraud" is being perpetrated by parties seeking to grab the mineral rights to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of anthracite coal.
In a filing late Monday, four property owners and the borough of Centralia asked a state appeals court to block Pennsylvania officials from seizing their homes. The state condemned the homes in the early 1990s but only recently moved to oust the remaining holdouts.
The state's attorney on Tuesday dismissed the residents' claims as "conspiracy theories" and predicted they would be dismissed.
A fire at the town dump in 1962 ignited an exposed coal vein, and Centralia was all but wiped off the map in the 1980s as the slow-burning fire spread underneath homes and businesses....
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
“A fire at the town dump in 1962 ignited an exposed coal vein, and Centralia was all but wiped off the map in the 1980s as the slow-burning fire spread underneath homes and businesses....”
Man that is wild. I’m ashamed of the money our politicians have wasted, while we let an American town basically burn down, very, very slowly. Surely we could have done something to stop or retard the fire. And now corrupt officials are trying to steal what little is left, at least if you believe the residents...and basically, I always believe the citizen over the government in cases like this.
The fire has been pretty effective at opening up the land for strip mining. Once its uncovered its easy to put out.
LOL love that show
As a kid I use to drive through there to my grandmother’s house near Pottsville, PA. We would drive through and when we came back homes would have sunk in the ground and cars use to sink in the road.
These people are whacked. I’ve been through that area at least a hundred times in the last 25 years, most recently last Thanksgiving. There is still smoke, it still smells of sulfur, there are new sink holes, there are still large chunks of forest dying.
Burning Mountain in Australia has been burning for 6000 years.
There is a coal seam in Germany which has been burning since 1668.
Fascinating stuff.
Yep. It’s like pee in a pool. Once it’s in, there’s no gettin’ it out.
5.56mm
I drove through there on a foggy damp day around 25 years ago. There were eerie blue flames visible from cracks in the earth. Although eerie, it was also actually cool to see.
These people are trully isane hold outs...for what?
Lucrative buy outs were continually offered. More than enough to buy a new home; Rather than take the money and start over, these people stayed in at best a smokey, smelly sulphur environment. For over twenty years. Why?
Whatever their dymanic, these loons CAN still relocate—taking the still offered settlements, if they had a working brain cell left...but they would rather, for reasons known only to them, stay and ‘fight’ some mythical battle...
Never heard of the ones in Pittston and Scranton (I grew up in West Pittston), but there is one still burning on Giant’s Despair in Laurel Run Borough.
I don’t doubt that it is difficult to extinguish a coal seam fire, but, perhaps the two examples you list are still burning because there has been no particular effort to extinguish them.
I believe men that can fly and split the atom could find a means to extinguish or at least severely retard the fire. What is lacking is effort and cash.
It is fascinating.
Thanks for the link.
Gotta love that Digital Underground. They were ‘freaky’!
Sounds like a good place to pump all that CO2 that is warming the globe.
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