Centralia, in Columbia County in the anthracite coal region of eastern Pennsylvania, was incorporated as a borough in 1866 and grew into an ordinary mining town built directly atop some of the richest hard-coal seams in the country. Its population peaked at roughly 2,700 around 1890 and had settled to about 1,000 by 1980, supporting churches, schools, a business district, and the close-knit institutions typical of Pennsylvania coal country. For nearly a century it was unremarkable — until the ground beneath it caught fire.
In May 1962 a fire, most widely attributed to the burning of trash in a former strip-mine pit being used as the borough landfill, reached an exposed anthracite seam and spread underground into the abandoned network of mines that honeycombed the area. Anthracite burns slowly, hot, and persistently, and the fire found a virtually unlimited fuel supply in the very coal that had given the town its livelihood. Repeated attempts to extinguish or contain it — flushing, trenching, and excavation — failed or were judged too costly, and the fire continued to spread for years beneath homes, streets, and the cemetery.
The consequences turned lethal and visible over time. Ground temperatures rose, steam and smoke vented from cracks in roads and yards, and dangerous levels of carbon monoxide and other gases seeped into basements. The crisis reached the national consciousness in February 1981, when a 12-year-old boy named Todd Domboski nearly fell to his death into a sudden, steaming sinkhole that opened beneath him; he was saved by a cousin. Faced with an underground fire that could not be put out at any acceptable cost, the federal government acted not to fix the town but to remove it.
In 1984 Congress appropriated roughly $42 million to relocate residents, and most accepted buyouts and left. In 1992 Pennsylvania condemned the remaining properties under eminent domain, and in 2002 the U.S. Postal Service revoked the town’s ZIP code, 17927. A handful of holdouts fought to stay, and a 2013 legal settlement allowed the last few residents to live out their lives in their homes. The mine fire is still burning and may continue for many decades — by some estimates more than a century — making Centralia a rare case of a town destroyed not by depletion or economic shift but by its own resource turned permanently hazardous.
Hashima — universally known as Gunkanjima, or “Battleship Island,” because its high seawalls and ranked concrete towers resemble a warship riding at anchor — is a roughly 6.3-hectare (about 16-acre) rock some 15 kilometers off Nagasaki that the Mitsubishi company turned into one of the most concentrated industrial settlements ever built. Coal had been worked on the island in a small way since the early nineteenth century, but it was Mitsubishi’s purchase in 1890 and the sinking of deep undersea shafts that transformed Hashima into a self-contained mining city of high-rise apartment blocks, a school, a hospital, shops, a shrine, and even a rooftop garden, all wedged onto an artificially enlarged outcrop.
At its 1959 peak the island held 5,259 residents on its 6.3 hectares — an overall density on the order of 83,500 people per square kilometer, and far higher still in the residential quarter — among the highest figures ever recorded anywhere on Earth, roughly nine times the contemporary density of Tokyo. The buildings that made this possible were pioneering: Building 30, completed in 1916, is generally cited as Japan’s first large reinforced-concrete apartment block, a typhoon-resistant design later replicated across the island. For decades the operation ran continuously, with coal hauled up from shafts that descended hundreds of meters below the seabed and ferried to the mainland.
Hashima’s existence was bound entirely to a single fuel in a single market. As Japan’s postwar economy shifted decisively from coal to imported petroleum through the 1960s, the island’s high-cost undersea mine became uneconomic. Mitsubishi announced closure in 1974; the mine ceased operation in January, and the last residents departed by April 20, leaving apartments full of furniture, televisions, and personal effects to the salt air. The island stood sealed and empty for thirty-five years.
Hashima’s modern fame is shadowed by its wartime history: from the late 1930s through 1945, Korean laborers and, from 1943, Chinese prisoners were conscripted to work the mine under harsh and often deadly conditions, with deaths variously estimated from roughly 130 to well over a thousand — a history central to disputes that accompanied the island’s 2015 inscription as part of UNESCO’s “Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution.” Tours resumed in 2009, and the crumbling towers — battered by typhoons and corrosion — now stand as one of the world’s most studied monuments to industrial obsolescence.
Pyramiden is an abandoned coal-mining settlement on the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, situated at roughly 78.65 degrees north at the head of Billefjorden, beneath the pyramid-shaped mountain that gave it its name. Founded by Swedish interests in 1910 and sold to the Soviet Union in 1927, it became one of two Soviet — later Russian — company towns operated under the Svalbard Treaty, which grants signatory nations the right to exploit the islands’ resources while recognizing Norwegian sovereignty. For seven decades it functioned as a showcase of Soviet life in the High Arctic, complete with the world’s northernmost Lenin bust, swimming pool, and grand piano.
At its height in the late 1980s the town held roughly 1,000 residents — miners and their families brought in on rotating contracts from across the USSR, particularly the Donbas and Ukraine. The settlement was deliberately constructed as a self-contained ideological statement: subsidized heavily by the state, it offered amenities that rivaled or exceeded those of mainland Soviet towns, including a cultural palace, sports hall, library, and greenhouses growing produce in imported soil under Arctic conditions.
The economics never made independent sense. The Pyramiden seams were thin and the coal of moderate quality, and the operation survived on political subsidy rather than profit — a forward presence asserting Soviet stake in a strategically located archipelago. When the USSR dissolved in 1991, the subsidies that sustained the town evaporated, and the state coal trust Arktikugol could no longer justify the losses.
Mining ceased in 1998 and the population was withdrawn over the course of that year, leaving buildings, furniture, and equipment largely intact in the dry, cold air. Pyramiden has since become a preserved curiosity — a near-complete late-Soviet town frozen in place — and a managed tourist destination reached by boat or snowmobile from the Norwegian seat of Longyearbyen.
Thurmond was a railroad and coal town wedged onto a narrow shelf of land in the New River Gorge of southern West Virginia, built almost entirely to serve the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway as it hauled bituminous coal out of the New River and Winding Gulf coalfields. Founded around 1900 on land controlled by coal operator Thomas G. McKell — and named for Captain William Dabney Thurmond, who had patented the original tract — the town existed because steam locomotives needed a place to take on coal and water and to assemble the long trains of loaded hoppers that the gorge produced.
At its height in the 1910s and early 1920s Thurmond was one of the busiest freight points on the entire C&O system. During the first two decades of the 20th century the town reportedly produced more freight tonnage than Cincinnati and Richmond combined, and roughly fifteen passenger trains a day passed through, the depot handling about 75,000 passengers a year — all with almost no road access, the railroad tracks serving quite literally as the main street. Two banks, including the National Bank of Thurmond, two hotels, stores, and offices crowded the narrow strip between the cliff and the river.
Thurmond’s prosperity, however, was bound tightly to a single technology and a single commodity. Steam locomotives required frequent coaling and watering stops, which is precisely what gave a place like Thurmond its reason to exist; the diesel-electric locomotives that railroads adopted from the 1940s onward did not. As diesels eliminated the need for division-point servicing and the long decline of Appalachian coal cut traffic further, the town’s economic logic simply evaporated.
Today Thurmond survives as a near-empty historic district inside New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, and the entire town is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The 1904 depot has been restored by the National Park Service as a seasonal visitor center, just five residents remained as of the 2020 census — making Thurmond the least-populous municipality in West Virginia — and the town stands as one of the clearest American examples of a settlement obsoleted not by a depleted mine beneath it but by a change in the machines that passed through it.