The Centralia Mine Fire

Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire

Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire

Almost 25 years after he wrote Unseen Danger: A Tragedy of People, Government, and the Centralia Mine Fire, author David DeKok has written a revised and updated book about Centralia, its people, and the underground mine fire that destroyed the town.

Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire, will be published by Globe Pequot Press on Sept. 1. It includes most of Unseen Danger plus three new chapters and other changes throughout, and takes the story to the present day. Almost 50 of David DeKok’s vivid photographs of Centralia, many in color, are included in the new book. Some were in the old, but most are being published in a book for the first time.

“Pennsylvania’s new Open Records Act, which took effect at the beginning of 2009, greatly aided my research,” DeKok said. “I was able to see Department of Environmental Resources files that had been denied to me in 1982—and even found a document from back then specifying which documents I could see and which I couldn’t. In addition, Columbia County Redevelopment Authority’s extensive files on the Centralia relocation were available to me.”

Some of the new material in Fire Underground includes:

–How Centralia’s small town innocence was shattered in 1961 by the murder of 13-year-old Jane Mary Benfield by an out-of-town sexual predator, Frank Earl Senk. Senk’s trial, which ended in a death sentence, concluded about a month before the tragic events leading to the start of the mine fire.

–How the “conspiracy theory” that the government is after Centralia’s supposed coal bonanza took hold and why it logically doesn’t make sense.

–How Bishop Nicholas C. Dattilo of Harrisburg flew to Centralia in a helicopter and pressed Columbia County Redevelopment Authority to acquire St. Ignatius Cemetery in Centralia—and move the graves to another Catholic cemetery 10 miles away. Heat from the mine fire is already melting snow in a small corner of the burial ground.

–Maps discovered by the Department of Environmental Resources only in 1985 showed a clear path for the Centralia mine fire to reach the nearby town of Mount Carmel albeit decades from today.

Author David DeKok

“I hope everyone who enjoyed Unseen Danger will find Fire Underground equally enjoyable,”DeKok said. “I appreciate all the support and comments I have received from readers over the years, and look forward to hearing from you about my new book.”