May 27, 1962, was an ordinary spring Sunday in the rolling green hills of Centralia, Pennsylvania. The roughly 1,000 residents of the small coal-mining town went about their usual Sunday routines, looking forward to tomorrow's Memorial Day festivities.
To get the town ready, officials had ordered the removal of the huge pile of trash sitting in the town dump. The easiest method available was to set it all on fire. Burning trash remains a common (but mostly illegal) way of getting rid of garbage, especially in rural areas without a robust waste infrastructure. Certainly in 1962, months before the publication of Silent Spring and years before the environmental movement really took off, burning waste was much more common than it is today.
There was just one problem. The fire that started that day never went out, and the town began a long, smoldering decline into oblivion.
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