Speaking of coal, I wonder what would happen if the Centralia fire got too close to an underground oil pipeline. Reckon that's something TPTB have thought of or are they ignoring the possibility?
I'm glad you asked because a few years ago one of my friends did a project on that possibility. It wasn't for oil, but for fracking back when there was a huge push by corporations for it around here.
Pennsylvania literally means "Penn's woods" in Dutch. There are trees goddamn everywhere. Huge, rounded off mountains entirely blanketed with forests. You can't escape them. They're fucking everywhere. You're goddamn surrounded. PA is basically a giant tinderbox. If Centralia were to ignite some other underground fuel source, there's a huge chance the entire state would just go up in flames.
Evacuating would be an utter nightmare. Most people in PA are poor, and live in rural communities in the valleys. They've lived in the same houses for generations, and can't afford to leave if something happens. They don't even know how they would leave. Rural PA is a very hard state navigate, especially if you don't know where you're going, and sometimes even if you do.
It's already very easy to get lost here, especially in the rural areas because the roads twist, and turn, and everything looks the same, and there's nothing, but empty, foggy, forested, mountainous terrain for miles. You know those Liminal Space things? Yeah, that's just rural PA in a nutshell. The cell service also sucks ass up there too (and in this state in general), so good luck calling for help if you do get lost.
Not to mention these roads aren't well maintained, and often just lead to dead ends, or abandoned houses. People can, and do wreck up in the mountains because some deer jumped in front of their car, and they swerved to avoid it, and they end up crashing through a rusted guard rail, and tumbling down a 100ft embankment, or end up stranded because they took a wrong turn, and ended up at some poor dead bastard's decades old abandoned cabin.
Now imagine thousands of panicked, angry, heartbroken, and now destitute people (a lot of them also strung-out on pain pills because oh yeah, the opioid crisis is in full-swing over here) trying to flee at the exact same time through all that when there's also thick, suffocating smoke, and giant walls of fire surrounding, and barreling down towards them.
Yeah. It wouldn't be pretty.
On top of that, Centralia is already a coal fire that is still spreading albeit slowly throughout the state, and it can, and does cause the ground to crack, and cave-in whenever it's done burning through what fuel it's gone through under there.
If an accelerant like oil, or gas was dumped into it too, there's a good chance of that same thing would happen on a much larger scale with the possibility of big landslides occurring because PA is made up of mountains upon mountains of coal, iron, loose rock, and other shit. Yeah, there's a fuckton of trees holding them in place, but that's not gonna mean shit when the ground literally burns out from underneath them.
I don't mean entire mountains would start shearing off, or anything nearly that bad, but all those abandoned mines, and iron, and coal veins that spread throughout the state would start splitting open, and collapsing in on themselves, and bring down whatever ground, or hillside they were under with them.
Those shitty roads I mentioned above? Yeah, a lot of them are also on top of those things. They'd start cracking open like fucking eggs, and people would start falling in like what actually did started happening Centralia.
Lastly, and this was just my friend's absolute worse case scenario, if the oil, or gas, somehow leaks into the Susquehanna river, the entire state is fucked. Most of PA is rural, and gets its water from that river, or one of its branches. If it's contaminated, everything goes to hell. Same thing goes with underground wells. Like I said before, most of PA is rural, and poor, and can't afford to lose their groundwater sources.
I haven't even mentioned all the heritage sites that would just be utterly annihilated if they weren't saved. Houses that have stood there since the very founding on our nation? Gone. Knoebels' Grove with all its priceless, antique, hand-carved carousel horses, and other animals? Reduced to ashes. Gettysburg? Up in fucking flames. All of it destroyed.
Simply put, there was a huge reason fracking, and the like got such a fucking massive pushback in PA, and why people still bristle like crazy at the mere thought of it, or oil drilling ever being a thing here.
Tl;dr: Absolutely
catastrophic damage that would make the Californian wildfires look like a cozy bonfire unless it was contained fucking immediately.
