Not so fun fact: There's a ghost town in Pennsylvania named Centralia that has had a fire burning underneath it since 1962.
It used to have a decent coal mining thing going on until a good number of the companies that operated the mines shut down, and then the city council had one of the mines repurposed as a landfill to dissuade illegal dumping. Regulations at the time required strip-mine landfills to undergo inspection, and someone had informed a councilman that the mine be lined with an incombustible material, as fires in these kinds of landfills were not uncommon and would cause significant damage.
Later that year 'round Memorial Day, they decided to clean it out, and it's suggested that the council had volunteer firemen light fire to it. By night, they had doused any visible flames, but two days later they doused them again. A week later, they had to do it again. Eventually a bulldozer was brought in to shift around the garbage so they could douse concealed layers of the waste that was on fire.
A few days later, a hole 15 feet wide and several feet tall was found behind a wall of waste that was
not covered by the incombustible material, and it's thought that this led to a labyrinth of other strip-mines which were still full of coal. By July, the smell of burning trash and coal could be smelled from the town church.
Smoke leaked from fissures near the landfill, and first attempts to clear out the burning coal were unsuccessful. Eventually someone sent a formal notice of the fire to the local coal authorities, and the city council decided to withhold the reason of the fire as they thought they would not get any aid if it was found out they set fire to a landfill (which was prohibited likely due to this very reason). By August, carbon monoxide levels from the fire reached lethal amounts, and all mining operations, period, stopped.
The initial company that was to clear out the fire (got the job via contract) was restricted from doing any exploratory mining to see how big the fire actually was by the Department of Mining and Mineral Industries and instructed them to work according to specifications drawn up by engineers who had no idea how big or active the fire was and only went off estimations. Intentional breaching of an underground mine inadvertently allowed large amounts of fresh, oxygen laden air in, further exasperating the fire. Eventually the fire traveled far enough into the mine where it caught a large seam of coal, and by October the company that was supposed to take care of it ran out of money.
A second contract to clear out the fire was approved shortly before the first contract ran out of money, which was also a disaster. They were supposed to flood the mines ahead of the fire with a slurry of crushed rock and water, but things quickly turned south and the region experienced a heavy period of snowfall and bizarrely low temperatures, causing the water lines to freeze, and a freak blizzard caused the rock crushing machine to freeze as well. This project also ran out of money, and partially drilled boreholes allowed the fire to spread further, and causing the fire to have spread 700 feet from it's origin by April. The temperature is around 190f, or 90c.
By the 80's it started taking it's toll on the residents of Centralia. People were exibiting signs of carbon monoxide and dioxide poisoning. A child even fell into a sinkhole in his backyard caused by the fires. The government swooped in in '84 with $42m in relocation money, and in '92 the governor hit the town with eminent domain so the town could be demolished. The fire traveled far enough to affect a nearby town, which in '96 had it's last home torn down.
Now, only 7 people still live in Centralia, and not for a lack of trying. In 2009, the governor began the formal evictions of the remaining residents, and in '12 the residents lost their last appeal against the eminent domain notices. A settlement was reached in which they were allowed to spend the rest of their lives there, but upon their deaths their property would be seized.
There's a funny image of a home that used to be a duplex that was split due to only one half being inhabited, and they put up buttresses to support the house. There's actually two of them!
Oh, yeah, and current estimations say the fire will burn for at least another
two hundred and fifty years.
Actual fun fact: the town's founder was killed by a bunch of micks called the Molly Maguires.
