‘Sherwood’ Episode 4: Does The Pennsylvanian Mining Town Permanently On Fire Exist?
If a fool and his money are easily parted, then Scott Rowley (played by Adam Hugill) in Sherwood is anything but. In prison for going on a crossbow killing spree in the first series, he tells Ryan, the new inmate, that a whole prison wing of convicts have approached him over the years asking him to tell them where the £15k he hid in Sherwood Forest is. But despite Scott knocking him back once, Ryan (Oliver Huntingdon) then takes another tack.
After telling him that he’d cut him in on his gang’s drug trade (“You’d double it, triple it, mate because this is an investment”), Ryan then asks Scott where he’d like to go to when he gets out.“There’s this place in America, a whole mining town in Pennsylvania,” says Scott. “It’s a ghost town, completely abandoned in the middle of these mountains, ‘cos back in the ‘60s this fire broke out in the mine, a gas explosion or something, and it’s been burning ever since. All these houses, shops, this whole town with fire burning beneath it and no one knows how to put it out, no one knows what to do. But it’s there, you put your hand to the ground and you can feel it, that heat raging beneath the earth. But yeah, I always thought it would be nice to go there, start again.”
By getting Scott to talk, Ryan is selling him his own dream, and it’s this manipulation that finally gets Scott to reveal the coordinates of where the money is buried in the forest. And while this place also doubles up as a metaphor for the ongoing undercurrents of previous unrest in British former mining communities, does this place really exist, and why is it permanently on fire?
Where is the ghost town with a constantly burning fire?
The place is called Centralia, in northeastern Pennsylvania, and in the mid-1800s, anthracite coal was discovered in the region, and mining began shortly afterwards. More than five mines opened in the next decade, and by 1890, the town of Centralia reached its maximum population of 2,761. But production of the coal started to decline at the time of World War I, then in the Wall Street crash of 1929, five mines were shut. People began “pillar robbing” around this time, extracting coal from pillars in abandoned mines, causing the mines to collapse in on themselves. However, in May 1962, a disastrous fire broke out in the mines of Centralia that has been burning ever since.
There’s been some dispute as to what actually started the fire. One theory is that a mine had been used as a landfill to dump rubbish, and that when the city council proposed cleaning it up for Memorial Day. “This might seem like irrelevant, small-town history except for one thing,” wrote author David Dekok in 2009’s Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire: “Centralia Council’s method for cleaning up a dump was to set it on fire.”
This landfill fire then spread to other nearby mines and along the coal seam.Joan Quigley argues in her 2007 book The Day the Earth Caved In that the fire had in fact started the previous day, when a rubbish collector dumped hot ash or coal discarded from coal burners into the open landfill, effectively creating a giant barbecue. Other theories were that a smaller fire had been burning since 1932 following a mine explosion that spread, or that it was a spontaneous combustion in a mine during a heat wave.
There were many attempts to put out the fire, but they all failed, mainly because there were so many mining tunnels dug under Centralia, that it was impossible to work out where the blaze was coming from, and equally impossible to stop it spreading. High carbon monoxide levels meant the air in the town was lethally toxic, but there were still residents living there 20 years later, despite the ground reaching more than 400 degrees celsius in some places. Smoke erupted from sinkholes and from house basements, and the residents were getting increasingly sicker. By 1981, it was like the fires of hell were opening up, especially when a young boy narrowly escaped falling into a fiery sinkhole. By 1991, US Congress agreed to buy out the remaining residents of their houses, but seven remained by court order (and are unable to sell or pass on their houses after their deaths). The town was condemned, and the ZIP code was discontinued.
But still the fire burns to this current day, and the 2006 horror film Silent Hill was inspired by this bizarre, true life story. Some geologists have predicted the fire could burn for up to another 250 years. Even more remarkably, in 2024, five people or the seven residents still live in the town – with Sherwood’s Scott Rowley apparently having designs to become the sixth, if he ever makes it out of the slammer.
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