The Fire That Burned Beneath the Floodwaters

In 1962, a coal seam beneath Centralia, Pennsylvania caught fire. Engineers tried everything — trenching, flooding, backfilling with clay. The town pumped thousands of gallons of water into the mine shafts. Steam hissed from cracks in the hillside, but the fire would not die. Sixty years later, the town is largely abandoned, the roads buckled and split by heat, and geologists estimate the fire could burn for another 250 years.…