10,000 Monkeys and a Camera

I like to check in with Google Sightseeing once in a while and when I stopped by the other day, I found a feature on Love Canal, a neighborhood in western New York. In 1978, the residents there discovered the reason for the 56% birth defects rate in their families: their neighborhood, their parks, their children’s school were all built on top of 21,000 tons of buried chemical waste. The local school board had approved the purchase of the land for the school knowing its history (and even leaned on the Hooker Chemical Company — now part of Occidental Petroleum — to get them to sell the site).

By 1980, the federal government stepped in and the neighborhood was abandoned. Eight hundred families were relocated, the school was demolished and the EPA began an attempt at cleanup. Most of the homes have since been demolished — you can see the vacant lots in the photos at the Google Sightseeing link.

This all got me to thinking about another community that was destroyed by a combination of the carelessness of politicians and the hazards abandoned by corporate fat cats. In this case, the town sat above an abandoned coal mine, which caught fire in 1961 and has been burning ever since. It is estimated that there is enough coal in the seam to keep the fire burning for another couple of hundred years. Gases vent up into town through the basements of homes and businesses, poisoning and heating the air and buildings.

I visited Centralia, PA around 1983, on a lab field trip for an Environmental Science class I was taking in college. We drove up from Carlisle for the afternoon. I remember putting my hand on the side of building and feeling the heat, hearing stories from residents about back yard swimming pools being too hot to swim in or the toxic air in their basements, and walking through a field where flat rocks could have been used for frying eggs.

At the time of my visit, most of the people and all of the homes were still there. It wasn’t until 1979 that the residents became aware of how much of a problem the mine fire was going to be, and then no one really paid attention to Centralia’s cries for help until a 12-year-old boy was sucked into a hole that suddenly appeared when part of his back yard caved in two years later. Congress finally got involved in 1984, financing a relocation program, and most of the residents left shortly thereafter.

I found Centralia on Google Maps this morning and it looks much like Love Canal. Most of the homes are gone now, but streets serve to remind us of what used to be there.

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