I've been to Centralia, back around '86. It was just an oddity then. It's not the only mine fire that's been burning for years. It's just the only one that wrecked a town (that I know of).
It's really weird to see the cracks in the ground and the smoke billowing out. There's a whole side of the mountain that smolders underground, the smoke rising in different places.
For some reason they razed the trees and made it look like a clearcut. I'm guessing they didn't want surface fires.
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