This weekend, we took you on a virtual tour of Centralia, a ghost town in Pennsylvania that's been burning for 50 years as a result of a mine fire.
The underground blaze that threatens Centralia, however, is just one example of the hundreds of coal mine fires burning today across the United States. A majority are found in Pennsylvania, home to the world's largest deposits of coal.
Reader Joseph Gregory brought one such town to our attention. Laurel Run Borough in Eastern Pennsylvania, where Gregory was raised, is the site of a mine fire that started in 1915 and is still raging, 97 year later.
Because coal fires burn underground, they are nearly impossible — and extremely costly — to extinguish. As a result, the smoldering coal deposits tend to burn for decades until the fuel source runs out.
These fires, which vent toxic fumes and pose serious health risks to people, are either started by humans or natural causes, such as lightning or forest fires.
A miner's abandoned lamp that set fire to timber, and eventually ignited a nearby coal vein, started the Laurel Run fire.
"Like Centralia, [Laurel Run] was the object of a joint Commonwealth and U.S. 'redevelopment' project in the 1960s," Gregory told us in an email. "Home owners, including my parents, in-laws, aunts, uncles, childhood friends and neighbors were forced to sell, under threat of fines. Every home, the school, the borough hall and our church were bulldozed. To date the 'redevelopment' has produced only promises of a park and the return of the land to heirs of the previous owners. Only an overgrown mountainside has materialized."
Gregory has been collecting photographs of what the town was and is now. He was kind enough to share some of his images.