Bill Hughes, Associated Press Still-smoldering Centralia now has about a dozen residents.

By Roger K. Miller Nearly everybody fiddled while Centralia burned, even its residents.

Shortly before Memorial Day 1962, a fire caused by the dumping of hot ashes broke out in the small town of Centralia in southern Columbia County in a landfill atop an abandoned 1930s strip mine. The fire moved down an underground coal vein and into the defunct Centralia Colliery.

	Chris Gardner, Associated Press Three young men stand along a buckled portion of Highway 61 in Centralia as steam and smoke escape from the mine fire that's been burning since 1962. Click photo for larger image. THE DAY THE EARTH CAVED IN: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY By Joan Quigley Random House ($25.95)

When the fire reached underground tunnels, it swept through millions of tons of anthracite, releasing deadly methane and carbon dioxide and monoxide.

The fire burned for years, defying, Joan Quigley explains, government's half-hearted "efforts to bring it under control by digging it out, starving it of oxygen, and pumping noncombustible powder into the workings." At one time it was judged not just the worst of 12 mine fires in the commonwealth, but of all 300 in the country.

Centralians tended to ignore the fire, putting up with illnesses, nausea, headaches, sudden sinkholes, snow melting in temperatures well below freezing, steam rising from the ground in all seasons -- and the nearly constant rotten-egg smell of sulfur.

Not an affluent community -- $9,000 was the median annual income -- its 1,000 residents were occupied just trying to scrape together a living.

Then, on Valentine's Day 1981, seventh-grader Todd Domboski, poking around one of the smoking vents that dotted the area, started sinking into the earth. He slid deeper and deeper into mud made hot and sticky by emissions from the fire, and was only rescued as his chin began to slip below the ground.

At that point controversies began boiling that led to the abandonment of Centralia. But it was not abandoned easily, quickly or peacefully.

And that is really what Quigley's excellent study is about. It takes up several fascinating topics -- the history of 19th-century mining, the thermodynamics of mine fires, the politics of coal -- but her central question is:

"Why did so many residents want to stay in Centralia, even as toxic fumes and cave-ins beset part of the community they loved?"

The answer is complex, but Quigley, a former Miami Herald reporter and granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Centralia miners, unravels it through seven years of research and interviews.

It involves individual, family and town histories. If it were strictly about the fire and its politics -- dodging responsibility to pay to fight it -- her book could be a third less long, but would be half as interesting.

The battle drew national attention. It came down to those who wanted the government, state or federal, to provide funds for relocating families against those who knew relocation meant the death of the town and supported efforts to extinguish the fire.

Protests took place amid fear of confronting a government that might retaliate by auditing taxes or laying off state employees. People were chary of rending the social fabric by alienating neighbors or family members who took the other side.

They resented outside interference, even while seeking outside intervention to solve the problem.

For many reasons -- memories, social and family connections, pride in place, respect for family, stability, tradition -- Centralians were reluctant to move.

Yet when a secret vote was held, true feelings came out. Unfettered by self- or peer censorship, residents voted overwhelmingly for relocation.

The author tells her tale extremely well (though timing of events is not always clear) and is mostly neutral in the disputes. If she has a villain, it is Ronald Reagan's clueless Secretary of the Interior James Watt, whose determination to make Centralia strictly Pennsylvania's problem held up distribution of available funds.

Ultimately it was a legal and political mess that Watt created that led to a $42 million relocation package (and his resignation) in 1983. Razing of buildings and dispersal of residents followed soon thereafter.

As for the fire, it still burns in Centralia, inhabited now by about a dozen residents. It could last decades, or a century. No one knows.