Centralia is a small, nearly abandoned mining town in Pennsylvania. I first heard of its peculiar story while reading Bill Bryson’s book A Walk in the Woods early last year. He stumbled onto it in some of his travels and proceeded to write about its curious history. This "curious history" has inspired and informed my current (and ongoing) body of work.

An underground fire began there in the early sixties, ignited where a coal seam met the ground surface at the dump just outside town. While several attempts were made to put it out, or to devise a plan to put it out, it was deemed too costly, and without any guarantee of success. As the engineers et al were doing their thing trying to address the problem, peoples’ basement walls were beginning to feel unusually warm to the touch, and the temperature at the bottom of the local filling station’s gas tanks was found to be dangerously high. But the issues of harm and danger came sharply into focus in 1981, when an 80-foot deep sinkhole yawned open as a local boy was playing in his grandmother’s backyard. The kid survived by hanging on to some exposed tree roots, but it was obvious that life wasn't going to proceed as anticipated. At that point, I believe, the town started evacuating, with each house being razed as its occupants left. Amazingly, evacuation was not mandatory, and so now there are perhaps 30-plus tenacious residents (and an auto parts store). Most live in single-standing row houses, looking oddly narrow with no immediate flanking neighbors, (having been torn down). The buildings have wide brick "ribs" running up their sides for increased stability. But otherwise there are vacant blocks, driveways that end in overgrown brush, and the ground in places is hot to the touch, with smoke wafting up. They say the fire – slowly consuming 24 million tons of anthracite – could last anywhere between one hundred and a thousand years.