Centralia, Pennsylvania is located in Columbia County, in the east central portion of Pennsylvania. Centralia was once a town built up around the coal industry, until a fire caught on the underground mines. Today, Centralia is the home of several people and an important location for recent history and has a haunting appeal to tourists. The most important lessons to learn from Centralia are how simple negligence can have such a devastating effect on a community and nature.
Centralia’s history has a somber past since the beginning of the 1900s. The town faced devastating effects of fires, the Spanish influenza, and the scandalous activities of the Irish miner’s organization known as the Molly Maguires. According to Deryl B. Johnson in Images of America: Centralia one of the worse plane crashes to take place before 1950 also occurred just outside of Centralia. Joan Quigley in Pictures: Centralia Mine Fire, at 50, Still Burns with Meaning noted that Centralia is most famously known for its underground mine fire, which is considered to be the worst mine fire in the United States.
Centralia was once a booming coal town formed in the 1840s that grew into a large community. Jon Guss in Inferno: The Centralia Mine Fire suggested that Centralia’s peak population was in the 1890s, with an estimated population over 2,500. It was filled with homes, businesses, churches, and bars, until one fateful day in 1962 events took place that drastically changed the town forever. An underground fire began in the Mammoth Vein of anthracite coal and it is estimated that it could continue to burn for a thousand years.
There are many speculations as to what caused the mine fire in Centralia, but there is one theory that is widely acknowledged. The fir...
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Guss, Jon. “Inferno: The Centralia Mine Fire.” Pennsylvania Center for the Book. Accessed December 12, 2013. http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/CentraliaMineFire.html
Johnson, Deryl B. Images of America: Centralia. Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2004.
McPhee, A. T. “Fire Down Below.” Current Science 88, no. 4 (2002): 8-9. ProQuest.
Nelson, Robert H. “Devastation by Degrees.” Wall Street Journal (2007): D.6. ProQuest.
Quigley, Joan. “Pictures: Centralia Mine Fire, at 50, Still Burns with Meaning.” National Geographic Daily News. Last modified January 8, 2013. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2013/01/pictures/130108-centralia-mine-fire/
Usalis, John E. “Documentarian Takes on the Tale of Centralia.” Republicanandherald.com. Last modified November 27, 2013. http://republicanherald.com/news/documentarian-takes-on-the-tale-of-centralia-1.1592282
Due to political aspirations, government bureaucracy, and greed 111 men lost their lives and devastated the lives of loved ones and a community. While, I believe that it was collection of people who is to blame for the explosion one person who could have really avoided this situation was Robert M. Medill and his assistant Robert Weir. Robert Medill, Director of the Illinois of Bureau of Mines and Minerals, was a man filled with greed and power and did nearly nothing to fix the hazardous condition in Centralia. Medill department were very aware of the dangerous conditions at the mine but ignored requests to correct violations. Instead, Medill and Weir’s handling of the inspection reports and other communications were not conducive to clearing
...ing the conditions faced by coal miners and their families in addition to events leading up to the uprising. However, some additional research should be done in regards to the West Virginia Coal Wars and the Battle of Blair Mountain.
Centralia Coal Company was owned by Bell & Zoller Coal & Mining Company. Herbert E. Bell was the Chairman and William P. Young was the Vice President. Illinois ranked third in coal production. Four agencies had authority over coal mining at the time; the state of Illinois, the United States Government, Centralia Coal Company and the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). The explosion in Centralia No. 5 occurred on March 25, 1947. Beginning with his appointment in 1941, State Mine Inspector Driscoll O. Scanlan sent inspection reports to the Department of Mines and Minerals (DMM) Director Robert M. Medill. The U.S. Bureau of Mines inspected Centralia No. 5 the first time in September 1942. Findings and recommendations were the same in all reports. Scanlan requested maintenance related to safety issues. The U.S. Bureau of Mines report supported his findings. In all this time nothing was done.
A World Lit Only By Fire by William Manchester is not only informative of the conflicts that occurred in Europe, but it is humorous and includes perspectives and anecdotes that are not viewed as impartial. It is structured into three separate sections: The Medieval Mind, The Shattering and One Man Alone.
Fires were a very common obstacle at the time, but nothing was even close to the fire of 1871. On October 8th, firefighters received a call from the neighbor of Catherine O’Leary. Neighbors reported seeing a number of flames coming from the cow barn. Firemen instantly spotted the fire, but miscalculated how big it really was. This event was historically known as the Chicago Fire of 1871 (“People 7 Events”).
Throughout this mining process a byproduct is created called chat. The chat is leftover rock and waste from mining that did not contained the desired materials. The chat was left on the site because the Bureau of Indian Affairs thought it could be of value to the Quapaw tribe (1). This chat contained high levels of toxic lead and other harmful chemicals. It is estimated that there are 75 Million tons (150 billion pounds) of chat piles remaining exposed to the environment as well as numerous flotation ponds that haven’t been taken into account (4).
Coal mines in these times were glorified death traps and collapsed. Often. Workers or their families were basically never compensated for anything, and even when they took things to court, essentially no court was sympathetic toward any coal miner or their family, and if their father or brother died, they were on their on for the rest of their life, often then forcing child boys to work if they weren’t already. Also, not many workers spoke proper english in the mines, so they could not read instruction signs, and by misuse of equipment, killing themselves and/or other
Centralia is a town—created in the 19th century because of the invention of coal—filled with diverse communities threatened from poisonous gas and toxin (deadly carbon monoxide and dioxide) after a trash burning fire spread underneath the town beginning in 1962 and is still under—or should I say above—fire. The documentary is about how the communities within Centralia were stripped of their lives and families from a place they called home.
The subsoil is likewise a source of riches. An example of this is the world’s largest open cast coalmine, located on the peninsula of La Guajira, which pro...
Danticat, Edward. “A Wall of Fire Rising”(2009). The Norton Introduction to Literature, Portable 10th ed. Alison Booth and Kelly J.Mays. New York: Norton, 2010. Pg.232-244
El Salvador, 6 April 1992--Three siblings died near the Guazapa volcano last weekend when they stepped on a mine planted during the period of civil warfare. Ironically, their parents had returned to the area only a few days earlier. The children were four, six and eight years old. Parts from the three children's bodies were found as far as 30 metres from the explosion site. (qtd. in Grant 25)
The setting is very important to the story because it allows the reader to identify where the story takes place. The town is full of miners: “Miners, single, trailing and in groups, passed like shadows diverging home” (798). The miners are going back home after a hard day at work.
The accidents involving machinery kill and/or hurt more coal miners in a year than any other mining accident. The machinery in mines are located in cramped spaces with little light, causing miners to have two times the chance of accidents. The accidents involving roof and rib failures can usually be averted if a mining company has a roof support plan. For a roof support plan to be made, information like entry widths, mine geometry, the number of pillars that must be left up right, and the number of bolts that must be used are needed (Cobb 3 of 5) Accumulations of gases in underground coal mines is another very serious hazard. If certain gases like methane and carbon monoxide are at or above 5% in the air they can cause violent explosions. Blasting in coal mines are the main cause for such dangerous levels of carbon monoxide.
Mining is the process or industry of obtaining minerals from the earth. Topics in this paper I’ll be specifically discussing are pros and cons of mining, structures of a mine, mining in general, California gold rush, diamonds in Africa, and comparison of diamond and gold mines.
As a result of this process, the mine sites "do not develop normal soil structure or support the establishment of a plant cover". Many mine sites have...