![]() ![]() Closest one is Bloomsburg and that’s a good 20 minutes away. I hope Downpour takes a better direction for the series. We don’t have any police or fire department around here. For heavens sake dont show us whats at the edge of the broken road :) akumapunk 11 years ago. “I don’t mind them four-wheeling on the broken road,” Long says. She says she’s not happy with the influx of “out-of-towners.” She doesn’t mind if they visit the Graffiti Highway, but she feels threatened when people get too close to her house. ![]() Rita Long walks her small dog outside of one of the lone homes within the confines of Centralia. An agreement was reached with the remaining residents in 2013, allowing them to continue living in the town-with the stipulation that after they die, the rights to their houses would transfer to the state. The USPS discontinued Centralia’s ZIP code in 2002. In 2017, there were just five permanent residents. Today, Centralia is the least-populated municipality in Pennsylvania. The Graffiti Highway is less than a mile long. When that fire was not properly extinguished, it spread into a maze of abandoned mines beneath the town. There are conflicting theories about what caused the fire, but in his book Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire, author David Dekok concludes that it started with the 1962 landfill cleanup. World War I and the stock market crash of 1929 contributed to a decline in coal production over the next few decades. The first mines opened in Centralia in 1856, and the town’s population peaked in 1890. “It’s still going that way, eating up all the coal it can. “The fire isn’t here anymore,” he says as he points down at the buckled asphalt and then gestures toward his hometown of Douglas. “Smoke came out of the giant crack up until about 2017,” says Mark Winter, who lives nearby and has brought his ATV to the abandoned highway. The highway, once part of Route 61, was taken out of commission after a large portion of the road buckled under the pressure from the mine fire. Locals frequently take their four-wheelers up and down the road, but I’m not intimidated as I walk down the center of it, looking at the constantly changing layers of inspirational quotes, names, smiley faces, American flags, and crude drawings of anatomy. ![]() Share and plan trips with friends while discovering millions of places along your route. Download the mobile app to plan on the go. ![]()
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