Centralia mine fire

As fire ecologist Richard Minnich has said, "You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he'll never be arrested."

In April 2020, amidst the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, the property's current owners made the decision to cover over the graffiti on the highway section of old Route 61. Several hundred mounds of dirt were laid over the area, thus ending a decades-long fascination with the desolate stretch of road.[32] Google Maps overhead satellite-view im... See more

Although there was physical, visible evidence of the fire, residents of Centralia were bitterly divided over the question of whether or not the fire posed a direct threat to the town. In The Real Disaster is Above Ground, Steve Kroll-Smith and Steve Couch identified at least six community groups, each organized around varying interpretations of the... See more

So many people live in the ruins of the American drive for prosperity. The residual mining towns are evidence. If you tell a story about the American worker in the twentieth century, you have to talk about the miner, Appalachia’s heroic archetype. Coal was the something indispensable for the industrial revolution. It is one of the most impactful fo

... See more

The Carr Fire, as it came to be known, ignited on July 23 near the hamlet of Whiskeytown, fifteen miles west of Redding, due to sparks thrown by a trailer wheel with a flat tire. Three days later, the fire roared into the city. The temperature that day was similar to Black Saturday, 2009: 113°F (tying a local record that was 13°F above the average

... See more