Old home movies reveal a crowded main street with stores, bars, a post office and a bank. Residents recall Centralia, PA, as a friendly town of unlocked doors, a community bound together by old-fashioned neighborliness. And then in 1962 the fire department set a “controlled burn” at the town dump that got out of control, igniting the coal seams running beneath Centralia. The fires still burn today and according to one expert, could burn for hundreds of years.
Out now on DVD, the documentary The Town That Was examines the chain of mishaps that transformed a vibrant if gradually declining community in Pennsylvania coal country into an eerie ghost town currently inhabited by 11 stalwart citizens who refuse to leave. Early on the fire's danger was underestimated. Skinflints at all levels of government refused to spend the money necessary to stanch the conflagration. By 1983, when toxic gasses and sink holes made much of Centralia unsafe, the Reagan administration decided it was cheaper to relocate the inhabitants than to put out the fire. Most of Centralia's citizens took the buy-out. A few clung to their homes.
First-time filmmakers Chris Perkel and Georgie Rowland explore a fascinating story, one that had already inspired a 2006 horror movie, Silent Hill. The haunting, wintry beauty of desolate Centralia, where most of the buildings have been razed and steam rises from the earth, lends The Town That Was an air of melancholy.
