America Spent $42 Million Moving A Town Off A Mine Fire. Putting It Out Would’ve Cost $663 Million

The Centralia mine fire cost $42 million to move a town. Digging out the burning coal would have cost $663 million. Congress funded the relocation. The fire began in May 1962 in Centralia, Pennsylvania, reportedly from a municipal trash burn that reached the Buck Mountain coal bed beneath the town. Between 1962 and the early 1980s, federal and state agencies tried contractors, trenches, flushing operations with over a million tons of fly ash, and drilling thousands of boreholes. A 1980 Bureau of Mines analysis put full excavation at $84 million over six years, later revised to $663 million in a 1983 Office of Surface Mining study; Congress appropriated $42 million instead to buy out homes and relocate residents. The fire still burns across roughly 400 acres, with temperatures above 400 degrees Fahrenheit recorded in 2011. Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection lists it as confirmed burning, warns the area is extremely dangerous, and estimates it will burn for more than a century.