Fire in the Hole

THE DAY THE EARTH CAVED IN

An American Mining Tragedy

By Joan Quigley

Random House 237 pp. $25.95

The Day the Earth Caved In starts like a Stephen King horror novel: Todd Domboski, a seventh-grader in the small Pennsylvania mountain town of Centralia, was crossing a neighbor's backyard one morning when a steaming fissure opened up beneath his feet and began swallowing him whole. "The soggy earth kept melting, sucking him in and burying him -- to his sternum, his neck, his chin. . . . This is it, he thought. I'm going to die."

Fortunately, Todd did not die; a quick-thinking cousin managed to pull him out of the molten hole unscathed. But the boy's mishap -- which occurred on Valentine's Day, 1981 -- was soon to bring worldwide attention to a problem that had been festering in this former coal-mining town for a generation. Ever since 1962, when a garbage dump caught fire in an abandoned strip-mining pit nearby, an underground conflagration had been slowly consuming the rich veins of coal underlying the town. By 1981, the fire had spread far enough for its erosive effects and noxious emissions to menace the lives and property of many Centralia residents. Just as critically, the fire had also begun to tear the town apart socially, pitting neighbor against neighbor in an increasingly bitter debate over how best to deal with the ever-growing threat.

Joan Quigley, a Maryland-based lawyer and journalist with family roots in the Centralia mining area, spent seven years researching this environmental crisis, and she has produced a thorough and often passionate account of its complexities. This is not the first time Centralia's story has been told, but Quigley explains it in a way that makes vividly clear how such a dire situation was allowed to drag on for so many years. By focusing on the motivations of individual townspeople and officials, she demonstrates how the conflicting interests of family, community and politics thwarted what should have been concerted action against a common threat, allowing the fate of an entire town to fall victim to inertia and neglect.

What makes the Centralia debacle especially disheartening is that it could so easily have been avoided. When the fire first started, officials estimated that a simple $30,000 excavation would extinguish it. But wrangling over costs among state and federal agencies delayed the project. As a result, the fire quickly outpaced excavation efforts, hiking the estimated cost to $296,000. Several cheaper "solutions" were then attempted, including flooding the underground tunnels with noncombustible fly ash to create a firewall between the blaze and the town, but to no avail. The fire kept spreading, the cost of the cleanup kept rising, and soon children were getting sick from the fumes. Eventually, Centralia was forced to decide whether the only real solution was to abandon the town site entirely.

The outlines of this story may seem familiar, since the Centralia fire (which still burns today) is part of a litany of corporate and governmental malfeasance that also features such notorious names as Love Canal and Times Beach. The literature on these environmental quagmires is long, and Quigley's publisher is trying to position her book as a latter-day version of A Civil Action, Jonathan Harr's brilliant 1995 account of a toxic nightmare in Woburn, Mass. The comparison, however, is apt only to a point. Quigley's narrative is cast on a much smaller scale than Harr's, and it lacks the kind of charismatic central figure that, in the person of lawyer Jan Schlichtmann, made A Civil Action so compelling. Extended reports on bureaucratic dithering, petition-gathering efforts and anxious vigils over carbon-monoxide monitors, moreover, don't always make for the most arresting reading.

Still, as a piece of explanatory journalism, The Day the Earth Caved In shines. Quigley obviously spent enormous amounts of time interviewing her subjects, and she displays a sophisticated understanding of the town's intricate social dynamics. And while she isn't afraid to assign blame for the fiasco (former Interior Secretary James Watt comes in for some particularly withering criticism), she steers clear of shrill polemics. Instead, she has written a tough but fair-minded cautionary tale -- and one that may have something of a silver lining: Nowadays, when a mine fire starts in the region, federal officials address it without delay. "Forty-four years after the dump caught fire," she observes, "no one wants another Centralia." ·

Gary Krist is the author of six books, including, most recently, "The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche."