Pa. coal town above mine fire claims massive fraud
By MICHAEL RUBINKAM (AP) – 55 minutes ago
ALLENTOWN, Pa. — The few remaining residents of a Pennsylvania coal town decimated by a 48-year-old underground mine fire claim in court papers that a "massive fraud" is being perpetrated by parties seeking to grab the mineral rights to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of anthracite coal.
In a filing late Monday, four property owners and the borough of Centralia asked a state appeals court to block Pennsylvania officials from seizing their homes. The state condemned the homes in the early 1990s but only recently moved to oust the remaining holdouts.
The state's attorney on Tuesday dismissed the residents' claims as "conspiracy theories" and predicted they would be dismissed.
A fire at the town dump in 1962 ignited an exposed coal vein, and Centralia was all but wiped off the map in the 1980s as the slow-burning fire spread underneath homes and businesses. More than 1,000 people moved out and more than 500 structures were knocked down under a government relocation program. Now only a few houses remain on a mostly empty street grid.
The property owners said they have evidence that the fire is "almost out" and no longer endangers their homes, if it ever did. Data kept by the Department of Environmental Protection show that underground temperatures have gone down by "several hundred percent" since measurements began. Further, a 2008 DEP study found that emissions of toxic gases are not a problem, according to court documents.
State environmental officials, though, insist the fire remains a threat to the residents' health. The blaze has likely followed the coal seam deeper underground — reducing temperatures in certain monitoring boreholes — but gases from the fire can still accumulate in houses atop the fire, they say.
Property owners also claim in court documents that their town was ruined "in the face of evidence that suggests that a massive fraud may have been perpetrated" by parties "motivated primarily by interests in what is conservatively estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars of some of the best anthracite coal in the world."
Their attorney, Andrew Ostrowski, said Tuesday that the borough owns the mineral rights. Once Centralia ceases to exist, the rights go to the state, which could sell them to a coal company to operate "one of the most productive strip mine operations in the country," he said.
Steve Fishman, attorney for the state Department of Community and Economic Development, the agency carrying out eminent domain, disputed that Centralia owns the coal underneath the town, saying it's not clear who possesses the mineral rights but that he knows of no legal document giving the borough an ownership stake.
He predicted Commonwealth Court would toss the residents' petition, noting it raises claims nearly 20 years after the fact.
"I've never doubted they would try this, since their pattern has always been simply to delay, hoping that at some point we'll simply go away," Fishman said.
As far as the fire, he said, "I don't think there's anyone who seriously believes that the fire is out, and that it does not pose a threat."
Ostrowski's law partner, Don Bailey, a former congressman and state auditor general, is working on a separate federal civil rights lawsuit in hopes of recovering "seed money" to rebuild the borough, Ostrowski said.
"It's a novel and unique case, and there will have to be some novel and unique remedies to apply to it," Ostrowski said.
