The Day the Earth Caved in: An American Mining Tragedy

The Day the Earth Caved In is an unprecedented and riveting account of the nation’s worst mine fire, beginning on Valentine’s Day, 1981, when twelve-year-old Todd Domboski plunged through the earth in his grandmother’s backyard in Centralia, Pennsylvania. In astonishing detail, award-winning journalist Joan Quigley, the granddaughter of Centralia miners, ushers readers into the dramatic world of the underground blaze——from the media circus and back-room deal-making spawned in the wake of Todd’s sudden disappearance, to the inner lives of every day Centralians who fought a government that wouldn’t listen.

Drawing on interviews with key participants and exclusive new research, Quigley paints unforgettable portraits of Centralia and its residents, from Tom Larkin, the short-order cook and ex-hippie who rallied the activists, to Helen Womer, a bank teller who galvanized the opposition, denying the fire’s existence even as toxic fumes invaded her home. Here, too, we see the failures of major

political and government figures, from Centralia’s congressman, “Dapper” Dan Flood, a former actor who later resigned in the wake of corruption allegations, to James Watt, a former lawyer-lobbyist for the mining industry, who became President Reagan’s controversial interior secretary.

Like Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action, The Day the Earth Caved In is a seminal investigation of individual rights, corporate privilege, and governmental indifference to the powerless. Exposing facts in prose that reads like fiction, Quigley shows us what happens to a small community when disaster strikes, and what it means to call someplace home.

Praise for The Day the Earth Caved In:

"Her scene-by-scene narrative reads like fiction but inspires outrage in the muckraking tradition of Lincoln Steffens and Rachel Carson.”

—The New York Times

"[A]s a piece of explanatory journalism, The Day The Earth Caved In shines."

—Washington Post Book World

“It is quite a story.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“First rate research and journalism combing to tell a sad, often infuriating tale.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“ Quigley’s riveting account of the nation’s most devastating mine fire will change the way you think about so-called natural disasters, and the emotions we attach to the places we call home. This is an extraordinary book.” — Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of American Democracy

“Quigley’s tale is a real-life epic of brutally indifferent government, greedy corporations and the unlikely heroes who fight for their basic human rights. It's all here; made in America. You'll feel enraged to know the truth of what happened in our mountains and proud of your fellow Americans who took on Goliath."

— John Passacantando, Executive Director, Greenpeace USA

“If you can imagine a book that combines the gritty dignity of How Green Was My Valley with the muckraking of Silent Spring, then you have some sense of this deeply affecting work.”

— Samuel G. Freedman, author of Upon This Rock

“Joan Quigley, the granddaughter of coal miners, has combined meticulous reporting and personal passion to bring us this important book — one that illuminates an underground blaze that many corporate and government officials sought to smother and conceal.”

— Gay Talese, author of A Writer’s Life

"'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... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) 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.'

" Reviewed by Elizabeth StroutKevin O'DonnellJabari AsimRon CharlesSarah L. CourteauJoel AgeeChrissie DickinsonRobert PinskyGary Krist, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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An inside look at the Centralia, Pennsylvania, mining disaster offers an evocative portrait of the dying coal town, the scene of the nation's worst abandoned mine fire, started in 1962, and the families caught up in the disaster, revealing never before known details about the struggle to provide a just remuneration to the victims. 25,000 first printing.

Joan Quigley first glimpsed the Centralia mine fire at age fifteen, during her grandmother’s funeral at St. Ignatius Cemetery. A former Miami Herald business reporter, she is a graduate of Princeton and of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She is a recipient of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for this book.