The Town That Was, by filmmakers Chris Perkel and Georgie Roland, tells the story of a small American town that has had an anthracite coal fire burning under it for the last forty years. At the time the fire started in Centralia, Pennsylvania there were more than 1600 residents and some 700 buildings in the thriving mining town. Today there are only eleven residents that remain.
Filmed over a period of five years, the film is an intimate look at the life of John Lokitis, the youngest remaining Centralian, and his poignant fight to keep his hometown alive while it disintegrates under his feet. Told through a series of flashbacks, archival media footage, and interviews with present and former Centralia residents, The Town That Was is a haunting documentary about the damage inflicted on one town by the coal industry and the American government.
“You could see the burning underground, it was just like looking into a furnace,” explains Lokitis of the fire.
Although the fire started in 1962, it wasn’t until the mid-1980s when multiple fires were seething under the surface, with splits appearing in the roads and only after one young boy fell into a smoldering mine subsidence, the government decided to take action. Rather than spend the estimated half a billion dollars to put the fire out, the government decided to buy the town and relocate its residents for $US42 million considerably cheaper than the money needed to extinguish the fire.
“They saved a lot of money by relocation,” explains David DeKok, author of Unseen Danger: A Tragedy of People, Government, and the Centralia Mine Fire.
The Town That Was documents the effects the mine fire and subsequent relocation had on the town residents and how, even today as the fires still burn, the few remaining buildings continue to be bulldozed with all traces of former residences and monuments removed.
Today, the remaining eleven residents are officially squatters in the rapidly disappearing Centralia, without any real rights or property in the town where many of them have lived their entire lives.
“We could be forced out at anytime,” explains one remaining resident. “I don’t trust the government, they have lied to us so much.”
A hauntingly beautiful, visually stunning documentary about a town destroyed by a coal fire and abandoned by the American government.
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