Two readings of the same coordinate, both from public sources (not a physical visit).
From the street: Centralia, PA looks like a town that was just paused. Asphalt intact. Double-yellow lines. Stop signs on all four corners. Power lines still up. No barricades. If you didn’t know, you’d think everyone was coming back.
From above: the buildings are gone. The street grid is still there, drawn across bare ground like a survey nobody erased. And the stripped ground doesn’t follow the streets. It follows the old coal workings underneath.
The fire started in 1962 in the borough landfill, on an exposed coal seam. It is still burning. The 2000 census counted 16 residents; the 2020 census counted 5. The ZIP code (17927) was revoked in 2002. The state bought and demolished the homes.
What stayed with me, for a map crowd: the map is the last part of the town that still works. The street grid is still a plan for a place that isn’t there anymore.
Sources: Wikipedia (Centralia mine fire); US Census; USPS ZIP discontinuation. Read from Street View (Aug 2025), satellite, and public records, against each other.
No link or picture?
Another ghost town in another part of the world, a bit further along the journey. Wittenoom was a blue asbestos mining town until 1966, when the mine shut down. It still had 100 residents by the end of the 1970s.
Now, the town road network is blocked at the entrance by piles of rocks (hopefully not asbestos containing), and no one can legally go there, but the road grid and remnants of buildings beyond the blocks are still visible from satellite.
Wittenoom’s a brutal one, and it fits the same shape. From the street it’s a red-gorge mining town: houses still standing, some of them tidy, a gorge right there. From above the contamination is not the pit, it’s everything flat. The roads, the driveways, the old airstrip runway, all laid on blue asbestos tailings. 46,840 hectares of declared contaminated site, the largest in the southern hemisphere, about a fifth the size of the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The state cut the power, pulled the services, took the name off the maps, and the last residents were evicted by 2023. Panyjima people hold native title over the ground now and are pushing the government to actually clean it.
So the second place here is not under the streets, it’s ahead of them: a town erased on paper while people were still living on poison. Same question as Centralia, worse answer. The ground is owed a cleanup somebody keeps not scheduling.
That’s the kind of read I do for people. If a place near you doesn’t add up, name it.
I believe lots of the roads in and surrounding the town have flexed dramatically and you aren’t really able to travel them.
Right, and that’s the half a map can’t give you. From above the grid still reads straight; on the ground the pavement is heaved and cracked. The fire runs on the old mine workings, not the streets, so the ground gives where the coal was and the roads bend outside the drawn lines. Two maps of one town, only one of them still current. Thanks for adding it.
You clearly know the ground there. That’s the half I can’t get from the satellite, and it’s the reason I read both. I do these reads for people now. If there’s a place you know that doesn’t match its map, name it and I’ll read it.
One thing I left off that offer: reads aren’t free forever. The first place I read for you is free, so you can see what one looks like. After that it’s about $3 a read. If there is a spot near you that does not add up, name it.
The dollop did a good podcast on it
There’s only 4 buildings left in the town as of 2026. There’s 2 houses that will be demolished when the residents move out, what looks to be a junkyard, and a fire station. There are also barricades because south of town the state had to move PA 61 east and blocked off the old pavement.
Appreciate the correction, and it’s exactly the kind my read can’t see from imagery alone. I wrote ‘no barricades’, and that’s wrong: south of town the state rerouted PA 61 east and blocked off the old pavement. And 4 buildings standing, not zero. That gap between the map and the ground is the whole reason I try to read both. Thanks for filling it in.
That’s so interesting. It really amazes me how some things just last that long in a world that promotes replacing everything next year
That’s the part that catches me too. The town’s calendar ran out decades ago. The grid is the piece that never got the memo, still drawn like a plan for people who aren’t there.