Centralia: The Real-Life Silent Hill | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by skillshare it's october it's a spooky time of year and if you're like me you like to watch spooky stuff in october and one of my favorite spooky things to watch on youtube are abandoned places videos there are a ton of youtube videos and whole channels dedicated to urban exploration things like abandoned factories abandoned schools abandoned balls those are actually some of the creepiest in my opinion now there's something about abandoned places that dichotomy of this place that's made for people but there's no people there you know you can't help but feel like why was it abandoned what happened to the people that were there what kind of stories does this place have you know even just an abandoned building is creepy but then there's entire towns that have been abandoned ghost towns entire communities are once bustling with families and life and business now sitting empty and quiet slowly being reconsumed by nature if you wanted to say create a super creepy video game a ghost town would be a pretty great place to do it and that's exactly what konami did in 1999 with their breakout hit silent hill silent hill is set in an abandoned town called silent hill west virginia where the story has it that they had a mine fire underneath the town and you know people abandoned it for that but then in the game as you explore the town you find out that actually you know underneath it is this sort of underworld of ghoulish nightmarish creatures and serial killers and monsters and and yeah i'm not a gamer so that's that's really all i know about silent hill but i do know it was a really popular video game that spawned an entire franchise and a couple of movies that i've been told are garbage and i know that silent hill was inspired by a real place not in west virginia but in pennsylvania it's called centralia pennsylvania and while it doesn't sit on top of a portal to the netherworld what is going on underneath the town is made at one of the most interesting ghost towns in america [Music] to understand what happened in centralia you have to understand at least a little bit about how coal forms because like a lot of the small towns that sprang up in the appalachian area in the early 1800s centralia is a coal mining town i'm sorry centralia was a coal mining town so we all know the coal forms from organic plants especially peat that over time the geological processes compress it and heat it up and eventually it pushes all the carbon atoms together until it becomes this form of rock that has the neat little ability to you know catch fire and some of the most conducive areas to create the plant life and the peat that's required to create coal over time are are marshes and swamps that are fed by rivers these rivers and waterways change directions and snake through the area over time as sediment builds up sometimes floods wash in and bury the whole area with sediment and then it all starts all over again and over millions of years as those swampy petey riverbeds compress they form seams of coal that worm through the sedimentary rock so coal mining in areas like this is basically a process of finding those coal seams and then just kind of following them wherever they go through the earth you know and it creates these labyrinthine tunnels that can pop in and out of the ground and then go down deep and wind left and right and up and down these weird three-dimensional things with ventilation shafts everywhere it gets really confusing so mapping these mines was crucial especially in the early days because cave-ins were common accidents happened and you had to be able to go and rescue people in the case of mine fires because mine fires were a thing that happened a lot you know the whole thing about coal is that it burns and then you have these mines that are filled the whole air is filled with particulate cold dust that just floats around and and then they're also using gas lamps to see their way and illuminate the minds and they use explosives to blow out new rock and clear the path to follow the scene even further it's it's actually amazing there weren't more mind fires back in the day mining disasters were just kind of a part of the way of life for a lot of these mining communities especially back in the old days when it was completely unregulated you know you'd have cave-ins natural gas explosions leaks of toxic poisonous gas mine fires the list goes on the worst mining accident in u.s history was in manoa west virginia in 1907. it was a natural gas explosion that had an official death total of 362 but many think that it could have actually been up to over 500 most of the victims were italian immigrants and children the worst accident ever was actually a mine fire in china in 1942 it was a mine that was run by the japanese and at the time they didn't really have the best record in in dealing with the chinese kitten in king but yeah this one was a mine fire and they decided the best way to stop it was to sort of cap it to prevent the oxygen from getting in and feeding the fire which makes sense the only thing is they didn't bother to you know let the miners out so 1500 miners died from carbon monoxide poisoning yeah i believe the word you're looking for here is damn so for centralia pennsylvania mining disasters on a much smaller scale were a pretty common thing it was a mining town going back to the 1850s centralia sat over a large deposit of anthracite coal which is the most pure form of coal so it was highly prized by the mostly italian immigrants that settled there it was never a large town the population peaked at around 2700 in 1890 and most of those people were minors families and minors or people who ran services that serviced the miners the depression hit the coal industry pretty hard and centralia suffered right along with a lot of the other towns in the area but it wasn't quite a knockout punch they kept going also just energy use kind of changed a little bit it switched to more petroleum and oil based over coal so the population would continue to dwindle over the first half of the 20th century and by 1960 only about 1500 people lived in centralia but they were about to experience the most epic slow burn of all time so as the story goes in may of 1962 the city council wanted to sort of clean up the landfill a little bit in preparation for memorial day festivities and the way that they chose to do that was by setting it on fire this wasn't an uncommon thing back in that day but in this particular case the fire somehow we don't really know how but it somehow spread into one of these underground mine shafts next thing you know there was a fire raging in a coal seam underneath centralia and that wasn't a big deal they didn't really take that seriously like i said they'd had many disasters and accidents over the years so they didn't really think too strongly about it but they did need to shut down the mines because there was carbon monoxide building up in there they tried to suffocate the fire by shutting off access to oxygen but the problem was like i said it was so labyrinthine inside of it there were so many different ventilation shafts and places that just it was impossible the fire spread so fast that it eventually became clear that there was no containing it and any solutions that they did come up with were just way too expensive so the mines were shut down permanently in mining in centralia pennsylvania was officially a thing in the past now this alone caused the population to dwindle over the next 20 years because you know mining was the main employer of the town so people left to find other job opportunities you know this is the same thing that happened hundreds of years earlier to oil towns and gold rush towns once that resource is gone the town is close behind but add on top of that the fact that you know there's this raging fire underneath the town the ground was measured at 900 degrees fahrenheit in some places and people began complaining of headaches and nausea due to carbon monoxide buildup people reported basements filling up with smoke the ground underneath the streets became unstable so streets became undrivable houses began to buckle and tilt i mean just imagine the foundation problems there were even stories of graves in the cemeteries burning up and falling down into fire pits below i mean that's some horror movie right there but still many of the towns people held on it wasn't because they thought the fire was going to go out geologists predicted that it was going to be going for a couple hundred years probably but you know this was their home and they didn't want to leave but there was also the financial problem of you know even if you want to move who are you going to sell your house to not a lot of people looking to buy a home that's teetering on the edge of a hellish cauldron of flame and if you own a mortgage or if you have a mortgage on this house and you're still paying on it you're kind of stuck there besides many people felt perfectly safe there this fire had been going for a couple of decades at this point i mean it's not like it had hurt anybody i mean it's not like the ground had given way underneath somebody's feet causing them to fall into a burning cauldron hundreds of feet deep or anything you can see where this is going on valentine's day in 1981 a 12 year old boy named todd dombroski was walking across his grandmother's yard when a sinkhole opened up underneath them dropping him into a cavern 150 feet high and just about the biggest stroke of luck i've ever heard of there was a tree root that just happened to be going across that sinkhole that he was able to hang on to while a cousin went and got help but for a lot of local and state authorities this was the final straw an act was passed through congress that paid the people of centralia for their homes to try to encourage them to move out and many of them took them up on that offer the population went from about a thousand in 1980 to 63 in 1990. these were the holdouts and they fought tooth and nail to hang on to their residency there in centralia but even their days were numbered in 1992 the state of pennsylvania condemned all the buildings in centralia to try to you know finally force everybody out they stopped running mail there and they eventually turned to eminent domain today they're officially seven residents in centralia and the authorities have kind of just decided to let them stay there as long as they take responsibility for their own risk and everything nobody wants to be seen as the politician that forced people out of their homes they are however banned from selling or passing on their homes to anybody in the future today centralia is more of a quirky tourist spot than anything though there's not really much to see there after the residents left the state just bulldozed all the homes and buildings there which was heavily contested by the residents i mean they're watching their homes where they grew up being torn to the ground former residents say the town is unrecognizable today forests have already filled in areas that were once blocks of homes with backyards with children playing streets are unmarked and frayed at the edges a few foundations a random stair step or two and if you're lucky you can find a vent sticking out of the ground or some random smoke but otherwise you wouldn't know that the town is sitting on top of a brick pizza oven in a bit of an epilogue when the fires damaged highway 61 beyond repair the state decided that simpler way to fix the problem is just to create a new highway that goes around the worst of the unstable ground and the old highway kind of became a tourist attraction of its own somewhere along the way visitors began tagging the abandoned highway with graffiti after a while it became known for it this random stretch of mangled highway in the middle of the woods just covered with graffiti now known as graffiti highway it was a must see for any curious centralia visitors it was a place where people could leave something of themselves in this ghost town it was a way for them to become a part of it graffiti highway became the sixth most visited tourist attraction in pennsylvania drawing photographers and instagrammers events have been held there which didn't sit well with the locals they complained about the usual stuff the noise the trash the fact that it's an unsafe area the fact that some of the graffiti was spilling over into private property and into the cemetery at the end of the road but this year as coronavirus hit and people were still gathering in in large events out there that was that was kind of that was kind of the final straw for them a company called pegnodi that actually owns the land eventually got so many complaints about it that they decided that it just wasn't a risk that they were willing to bear anymore so earlier this year they covered up graffiti highway with soil so the graffiti highway is no more a huge campaign was launched to try to save the graffiti highway but yeah it was to no avail just like the former residents fought to save their homes this new group came later and tried to save their own piece of centralia now amazingly the fire underneath centralia is just one of 38 known mine fires in pennsylvania that are burning right now now none of the others are threatening any small towns that i'm aware of anyway that i could find but around the world centralia isn't alone nor is it the worst in gerea india over 70 different mine fires going back to the 1800s have eventually coalesced into one giant mine fire that's swallowed homes destroyed train tracks even drained a river yet in 1995 a riverbank collapsed that drained a river into a mine shaft that killed 78 workers and the jury of fire is not just a problem because of the destruction of property and whatnot that's going on it also pumps thousands of tons of co2 into the atmosphere every year a burning coal seam in brenderburg germany has been burning since 1688. they don't know exactly how it started but to this day visitors can go and you can see steam and smoke coming out of the ground and apparently back in the day kids used to go and steam eggs over some of these cracks i guess steaming eggs was like the playstation of its time but if a 300 year burning fire sounds insane you should check out the burning mountain near wengen new south wales in australia this is a fire underneath this mountain that's been burning for an estimated 6 000 years the entirety of recorded human history this fire has been burning it's estimated to be traveling due south that are rated about one meter per year which would put it in sydney in about 225 000 years so if you live in sydney you better start making plans obviously sydney's not in danger any time soon but many other cities are not by coal fires but from rising sea levels it's estimated that by 2050 570 low-lying coastal cities are going to experience at least a half a meter of sea level rise that equates over 800 million people this means more intense storms more flooding events and more damage to essential infrastructure and services some of the most vulnerable cities include jakarta bangkok lagos manila dhaka shanghai london and houston which is not only right at sea level but is actually sinking due to the extraction of groundwater oil and natural gas underneath assuming things continue at this current rate millions of people are going to find themselves in a similar situation to the people of centralia in fact i would argue that the small towns are in even more danger than the big cities because of course they're going to focus more attention on saving the big population hubs because more people there i mean how are people going to react when it becomes obvious that the place that they live the place that they call home isn't safe anymore human beings have a very strong connection to place it's part of our identity it's part of our history you know it's a huge world with a lot of things to experience and go see but most of us spend most of our lives pretty close to where we grew up i'm guilty of this i mean i've never lived outside of 100 mile radius of where i was born you know and on top of that the economic problem again of you know what do you do who do you sell your home to when flood waters are lapping up against your front door and i think you can get a good picture of what we're going to see over the next 100 years when these problems really start to manifest centralia is kind of a metaphor for what's going on around the world right now you know this hidden danger underneath our feet threatening to take away our way of life while we just kind of mostly ignore the problem and carry on just delaying the inevitable centralia is the canary in the coal mine the charred canary in the flaming coal mine but hey to end on a lighter note i talked earlier about how centralia inspired silent hill it also inspired another movie with a vastly different tone a vastly different everything really it's called nothing but trouble and it was written and directed by dan aykroyd and it is it is a weird movie it takes place in a town called vulcanvania that's fallen into abandonment and disrepair because of a coal mine fire under the town and it's run by this crazy judge played by dan aykroyd that sentences people to death by putting them on this roller coaster called the bone stripper that just turns people into skeletons the courthouse is in his home and it's like this bizarre winchester mystery house place with rooms in nowhere and secret passages and it's in the middle of this junkyard that's run by these two giant babies and diapers it is the biggest hot mess of a movie ever and i love it it's got john candy in it chevy chase demi moore dan aykroyd plays like five different characters in the movie the digital underground shows up and there's just this random musical number right in the middle of it tupac shakur was in there tupac shakur made his film debut in this movie so hey centralia is a sad story but at least it spawned one of the most bonkers movies of all time and it's actually inspired a lot of people there's some really cool uh documentaries about centralia out there on the internet i'll put them in the description down below but if there's something in your hometown that's inspired you in some way or a story in your family it's just some story that you always wanted to tell but you didn't really know exactly how to approach it one place that i could recommend you go to get some more inspiration would be diy cinematography make your video look like a movie on skillshare taught by filmmaker ryan booth who's done a lot of behind the scenes documentaries on movies including the revenant in this class he'll walk you through his creative process to make his stories look beautiful intentional and of higher production value in a quick and easy way using the tools you already have available as he says in the first video the goal is to make you look at your own work and say hey that looks like a movie so by the end of the class you'll have the confidence to take on that creative project and tell that story you've been thinking about for a while now this is of course just one of thousands of classes on skillshare covering everything from business essentials graphic design marketing video production cooking basically anything you're interested in there's an expert there ready to teach it to you on skillshare join the millions of people who are learning on skillshare today if you're one of the first thousand people to sign up at the link down below you'll get a free trial of skillshare premium and it's only ten dollars a month after that there's a ton of stuff to learn on skillshare i can highly recommend it so go check it out links down below thanks to skillshare for supporting this video and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon that are supporting this entire channel helping me grow a team and just forming an awesome community they're good people and there's some new people that have just joined i need to murder the names real quick we got patrick j hammers uh daniel hansen paul herring tyler durden i don't think that's his real name uh mary burline ray wyman jr joe carpenter chris guffey rova t gustav comps and craig robinson thank you guys so much if you like to join them get early access to videos some behind the scenes stuff bloopers from time to time and exclusive live streams you can go to patreon.com please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here google thinks you'll like this one so why not or you can check out any of the videos down here that have a face on it and if you like them i invite you to subscribe i come back with videos every monday you'll be the first to see it alright that's it for now you guys go out there have an eye opening week and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 441,501

Rating: 4.9250784 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, Centralia, Mine fire, Environmental disaster, Coal mining, Silent hill, Ghost town, Abandoned town

Id: aDffEbKd6Ko

Length: 17min 54sec (1074 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020