02/04/07 Centralia
That’s what I was doing a while ago. Sitting outside, reading A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson. He mentions this town in Pennsilvania called Centralia, whose claim to fame is that it sits on an anthracite coal vein that caught fire in 1962 and has been slowly burning since. The estimate cost to put the fire out was so high that the government decided to tear down the town and relocate all it’s residents instead. Bill says about his visit:
As people moved out, their houses were bulldozed and the rubble was neatly, fastidiously cleared away until there were almost no buildings remaining. So today Centralia isn’t really a ghost town. It’s just a big open space with a grid of empty streets still surreally furnished with stop signs and fire hydrants. Every thirty feet or so there is a neat, paved driveway going fifteen or twenty yards to nowhere.
I pictured the place on my head, thinking how interesting would be to see this place someday and wondering what it would really look like. But, I realized, I don’t have to wonder. As the rain drove me back inside, all I had to do to see some images of this place was look it up online. 10 years or so ago, I wouldn’t have known more about Centralia than what Bill tells on his book. Now I can see photos and get more background or even a different point of view on the story from the confort of my living room. I found, among many other things, a site with lots of info and photos on Centralia and even a documentary called The Town That Was, wich of course I totally want to see now.
Yes, I know, I had said on the last post that this blog would undergo a renovation. But, of course, now that I said that I feel like blogging again. I haven’t discarded the idea of a new look and feel of this site. I’m still working on it. We’ll see as time goes on how the new look develops and how I’m feeling about the current state of this blog. One thing I know for sure; there’ll be more activity here. I don’t want use my daydreams of a new site as an excuse to procrastinate.
Technorati Tags: Centralia, Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods
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