The Day the Earth Caved In: An American Mining Tragedy [Paperback]

Joan Quigley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 14, 2009

Beginning on Valentine’s Day, 1981, when twelve-year-old Todd Domboski plunged through the earth in his grandmother’s backyard in Centralia, Pennsylvania, The Day the Earth Caved In is an unprecedented and riveting account of the nation’s worst mine fire. In astonishing detail, award-winning journalist Joan Quigley, the granddaughter of Centralia miners, ushers readers into the dramatic world of the underground blaze. 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, the bank teller who galvanized the opposition, denying the fire’s existence even as toxic fumes invaded her home. 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In 1962, an underground fire began in a large abandoned mine in Centralia, Pennsylvania. The fire continued to simmer but apparently posed no threat to the townspeople whose homes and recreation areas sat on the ground above the mine shaft. Then in 1981, a 12-year-old boy was sucked through the weakened ground in his backyard into a muddy, steaming cauldron, barely escaping alive. When investigation revealed the full extent of the danger, the town and its residents were launched on a long, frustrating odyssey that drew in federal and state governments, the national media, hordes of attorneys, and large corporations. Quigley, the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Centralia miners, is a former business reporter for the Miami Herald. In her engrossing saga, government agencies at both the federal and state levels are shown as irresponsible and craven, and the greed of corporations is sickening. But the townspeople, striving for economic justice while clinging to the hope of saving their threatened community, wear the mantel of nobility. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

“Reads like fiction but inspires outrage in the muckraking tradition of Lincoln Steffens and Rachel Carson.”—New York Times

“A real-life epic of brutally indifferent government, greedy corporations, and the unlikely heroes. 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

“A thorough and often passionate account . . . The Day the Earth Caved In shines.”—Washington Post Book World

“Fascinating . . . [an] excellent study.”—Denver Post

“First-rate research and journalism.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“It is quite a story.”— Wall Street Journal

“ 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

“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

“Quigley takes this complex story involving politics, science and history and weaves it into something that informs and entertains.”—Lexington Herald-Leader

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (April 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812971302
• ISBN-13: 978-0812971309
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #877,610 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tragedy in the coal region, May 4, 2007

By 

Frank J. Konopka (Shamokin, PA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Day the Earth Caved In: An American Mining Tragedy (Hardcover)

Having been born and raised in Mount Carmel, which is about 4 miles west of Centralia, I can claim some familiarity with this tragic series of events. As I am now the solicitor for the Borough of Centralia (or what's left of it), I know many of the people written about in the book. There are only about 15 or so folks remaining in the town, but these are people that absolutely refuse to leave. It's almost impossible to have all of the borough council offices filled, so next month we are going to court in Columbia County to receive permission to reduce the number of required council members. In the hard coal region, there are numerous people who were born, married from, lived in, and were buried from, the same house. Centralia, like most small hard coal towens, was an extremely close-knit community where everyone seemed to know everyone else, and everyone else's busines. As an example, in Mount Carmel when I was in high school in the early '60s, there were about 6 or 7000 people, but a letter addressed to my parents, with just their names and no address, would be correctly delivered to our house.That close-knit feeling in Centralia was shattered when Frank Jurgill (a high school classmate of mine), came running from the town dump in 1962 to announce that it was on fire. I take no stand on how the fire started. I know that Dave DeKok, whom I knew when he was a reporter here, and whose book I also own, disputes how the fire began. That really isn't the point of the book, rather it is what happened after the fire was discovered that is the heart of the book. These were folks who refused to leave their family homes until there was so much danger that they just had to go. There is a lot of anger on the part of the remaining citizens, who still suspect some type of conspirary to uproot them so that one of the former local politicians, who is involved in strip mining, has the opportunity to get control of the mineral rights to the ground, which now belong to the borough. It is that stubbornness to yield to what they perceive as an injustice that will keep those diehards in their town until the last one dies. I admire them for their courage in the face of adversity, and intend to continue to represent them legally as long as they will have me. They are true heroes, and when you read the book, you will easily pick out the villains in the woodwork.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars One Mine Fire, Two Books, August 24, 2007

By 

Jeff Beauchamp "Gibson EB3" (Cold Spring, NY) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Day the Earth Caved In: An American Mining Tragedy (Hardcover)

I first found out about the underground coal mine fire at Centralia PA and the devastation of the town above it while surfing the Web, looking for information about urban ruins. The photos I saw on various websites were eerie: where a small town once stood there was now only streets and sidewalks. A sliver of a dwelling that had once been part of a string of row houses stood alone, propped up on either side by brick chimney-like buttresses that provided the support that other dwellings, now torn down, once gave. Steam rose from cracks in a twisted and abandoned highway or from patches of scorched earth surrounded by dead vegetation. While these photos were very creepy and intriguing, I didn't stop to read much about the story of Centralia; I was on a quest to find out more about abandoned sites closer to my home in New York State's Hudson Valley region that I have seen for myself and visited: the Lente house, Bannerman's Island Arsenal, and the Cornish Estate.

Years later but a few weeks ago I happened across the last five minutes of a segment on C-SPAN's Book TV that caught my attention. Joan Quigley, author of "The Day the Earth Caved In" was talking about the Centralia mine fire. From the little bit I saw of the show it was clear that there was much more to the Centralia story than what I gathered from the photos on the Web. I eagerly wrote down the name of the book and its author so that the next time I visited Amazon I could order it. After adding the book to my shopping cart, Amazon suggested that I also might want to check out David DeKok's "Unseen Danger", an earlier volume on the same subject. I ordered both.

As chance would have it, "Unseen Danger" arrived about a week before "The Day the Earth Caved In" and now, having read both books, I'm glad it did. I have a busy life and don't have a lot of time to read but I found Mr. DeKok's telling of the story so compelling that I neglected a lot of my duties around the house to make time for it. I took it to work and read it on my lunch and dinner breaks. I stayed up into the early morning hours, far longer than I should have, to finish it in a couple of days instead of the weeks it usually takes me to read a book.

As the blurb quoted on the cover from the New York Times Book Review states, there are "enough bureaucratic villains [in this story] to fill a Dickens novel." I would add that there were some Centralian citizens (especially one infuriatingly obnoxious homeowner in particular who I kept hoping would disappear into a subsidence) and the local Catholic church (who should have also suffered the same fate) who deserved to be included in that category as well. This is a story of missed opportunities, inter-governmental squabbles, denial of the present realities and local feuds all working together to turn the lives of the residents of this beleaguered town into a living hell. Mr. DeKok does a fine job of telling the story and it is obvious that he put a tremendous amount of effort into researching it and a lot of detective work into trying to separate fact from fiction, especially when it comes to the matter of how the mine fire got started in the first place. He paints a clear and terrifying picture of what the residents who were most effected by the danger had to go through before they got some relief, and the unconscionable indifference that government officials showed to the plight of their constituents in order to protect their own political behinds. The cast of characters in "Unseen Danger" is large and varied and includes the above mentioned villains and a few heroes too. The attention to detail is astounding and makes for extremely compelling reading.

However, in my opinion, the book is not without its flaws. While the above mentioned attention to detail is most welcome, at times it can be confusing, especially when trying to picture the relative locations of the events. Three small maps are included in the paperback edition that I read; one showing where Centralia is located in relation to large East Coast cities, a local map indicating local landmarks and some street names along with the locations of the fire's origin and the site of one especially scary event, and a third map that indicates where the fire hot spots were located in 1983. These graphics are only helpful in a minimal way and don't go far enough toward clarification.

Photographs appear at the start of each chapter and there are a few in the bodies of the chapters. In terms of graphic clarity (not subject matter) all leave much to be desired and in many cases they are of such poor quality as to be useless. They have the appearance of being photocopies of photocopies of photocopies and are of such high contrast that the very features that they were intended to illustrate have become invisible. I do not blame Mr. DeKok for this - his publisher should have done a better job. As for the type of photos included, there are many of Centralians effected by the fire, some of the government workers who had to deal with the situation on almost a daily basis, one of the fire itself, and many of the government figures involved. However there is one glaring omission: aside from the cover photo which is obscured by the bold lettering of the book's title there are no pictures of the town, either as it was at the beginning of the story, during, or after. For those, one must go to the various websites dedicated to the subject.

Ms. Quigley's book generally does not suffer from these kind of setbacks. Even before her Prologue we are provided with a nearly full page map which clearly indicates street names, locations of local landmarks, locations of the principal character's homes, indications of the sites and scope of efforts to stop the fires, and a distance scale to help us better grasp the relative proximities of the places and events described. I wish I had this map while I was reading "Unseen Danger", it would have increased my appreciation of that book all the more. "The Day the Earth Caved In" contains eight pages of black and white photographs, all well reproduced, including one of the authors' grandparents row home from 1984, and one taken in 2000 of a tourist observing a cloud of vapor emanating from a non-descript area in the woods, as well as photos of mine workings from the 1880's and pictures of some of the people central to her telling of the story. As with "Unseen Danger" wide angle photos of the town before and after are absent and their inclusion would have helped drive home the immense scope of this catastrophe. Again, one has to search the Internet to find those kind of pictures.

While David DeKok relates the Centralia story by presenting an almost day by day account of the events that occurred he does not get inside the heads of the principals too deeply. He doesn't have to - anyone who has an atom of imagination can empathize or sympathize with the horrors that these people must have been through. But what left me scratching my head in bewilderment after I finished his book was why the Centralians were so reluctant to leave their homes and flee the danger. I suppose this is because I was born and raised in New York City and have moved to new homes five times since I left my parents house - once because the dangers of living in a loft on NY's Lower East Side became too much to bear. It wasn't until a few days ago while discussing the matter with a co-worker who grew up in a small town in upstate New York (population about 2000) that I really began to understand what made Centralians want to cling to their homesteads so tenaciously. Joan Quigley, by telling her version of the story through the eyes, histories and emotions of a few of the key players attempts to explain that sense of attachment, but is only partially successful. Ironically enough, it is DeKok's sparse explanation that comes closest to what my co-worker told me and what I've observed since moving from NYC to a small town: that many people living in small towns are fearful of the outside world and are much more likely to cling to surroundings that are much more familiar and therefore comforting.

Quigley's device of presenting the story by delving into the personal histories and feelings of her selected subjects is a welcome supplement to the mine fire disaster story as told by DeKok but ultimately it falls short in conveying just how desperately dangerous their situation was. At times I got the impression that she feels that the personal relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children or neighbors and neighbors is the interesting part of the story and the mine fire and its dangers were just a backdrop to that soap opera. Major events, like one man's close encounter with death by carbon monoxide poisoning while asleep in his bedroom and the circumstances leading up to it are described in great detail in "Unseen Danger" while Ms. Quigley mentions it almost in passing, preferring to more often dwell on what clothes a person was wearing. (What bearing does who wore what color pants suit on a particular day have on the story at hand? Inexplicably, these kind of observations appear far too frequently.) This is generally indicative of both authors approach to their subjects.

Similarly, Mr. DeKok tends to speak with authority and presumably understanding on technical matters while Ms. Quigley shows some lack of comprehension. For example, at one point she states that oxygen was the fuel that kept the mine fires burning. Just for the record: coal is the fuel that is consumed by the fire while oxygen needs to be present for oxidation - burning - to occur; oxygen in and of itself does not burn. This is elementary Junior High school science. While I realize that the point Ms. Quigley was trying to make was that some scientists proposed that if the mine fire were to be deprived of oxygen... Read more ›

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars riveting story, meticulously researched and thoughtfully told, April 9, 2007

By 

beezneez - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Day the Earth Caved In: An American Mining Tragedy (Hardcover)

I would not have thought that the story of a coal mine fire could be so fascinating, but Joan Quigley could probably bring excitement to any subject she chose to explore. Her portrayal of the characters and events involved is vivid and compelling, as is her scrupulous research. Highly recommended.