The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town
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The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town
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Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town
#2I find the story of Centralia fascinating. I read through the entirety of Unseen Danger https://archive.org/details/unseendangertrag0000deko, marvelling how it went from something that could have been handled easily if there had been funding, to something that killed the entire town with heavy doses of politics along the way.
Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town
#3Mildly related: In North Philadelphia there are a few blocks known as the Logan Triangle that were abandoned once it was discovered that the topsoil was not stable.
https://hiddencityphila.org/2022/06/in-limbo-logan-triangle-...
Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town
#4I always thought it was an interesting story, drove out there one day many years ago when I lived nearby. It was a dreary day, which added to the strangeness of the place.
It's an interesting place because it's not that far from other towns, and you can drive right through it on a normal, maintained road. If you turn off and drive just a minute or two it's very different though.
Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town
#5The author keeps taking jabs at “capitalism” - but let’s be honest that this could happen in any political/economic system. This cheapens the article.
Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town
#6The author keeps taking jabs at “capitalism” - but let’s be honest that this could happen in any political/economic system. This cheapens the article.
It was done deliberately in the USSR, in a process known as Underground Coal Gasification. Oxygen and steam are injected to convert the coal to syngas (CO + H2) which is brought up to the surface. This allows exploitation of coal deposits that are not suitable for conventional mining.
Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town
#7The author keeps taking jabs at “capitalism” - but let’s be honest that this could happen in any political/economic system. This cheapens the article.
There's only one explicit reference to capitalism.
Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town
#8The author keeps taking jabs at “capitalism” - but let’s be honest that this could happen in any political/economic system. This cheapens the article.
There's only one explicit reference to capitalism.
Also a comparison to Chernobyl (which no one would ever think they were anywhere near related.). Clearly the author wanted to communicate “something” more than the interesting takeover by nature.
Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town
#9Neat read on the whole, but was fun to see how huge the author believes Estonia is:
> When Estonia, for example, became independent of the Soviet Union, some 245 million square miles of collectivist farmlands were simply abandoned.
Re: The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town
#10"What Flynn makes clear is that while we tend to think of human activity on the landscape as not only damaging but irreversible, this may not always be the case."