On May 27, 1962, the borough of Centralia had a small housekeeping problem. The town landfill, an old strip-mine pit, needed tidying before Memorial Day, so firefighters set the trash alight. The fire found an opening into the maze of abandoned mine tunnels under the town, reached the coal down there, and settled in.

It is still burning.

Everything that has happened to Centralia since, the emptying, the money, the courtroom fight, followed from a routine cleanup that got away from a handful of volunteers.

We keep coming back to the numbers, because they read like a strange kind of accounting. Congress put up $42 million to move a town. The town moved. Then eight people were paid $349,500 to stay in a place the state had already decided no longer existed.

What follows is our attempt to make sense of how those figures fit together, and what the fire outlasted.

The fire that started at the landfill and never stopped

For close to twenty years, the fire underground was more nuisance than emergency. Smoke drifted from vents in yards and along roads, the ground stayed warm in winter, and people mostly lived with it.

That changed on Valentine’s Day 1981. A 12-year-old named Todd Domboski was standing in his grandmother’s backyard when the ground opened beneath him. He clung to a tree root above a steaming pit full of carbon monoxide until his cousin pulled him out.

The near-death of a child did what years of smoke had not. It brought national attention, and it brought Washington. Engineers figured the coal under Centralia could feed the fire for generations. There was no realistic way to put it out and no safe way to keep living above it. The decision, in effect, was to move the people rather than fight the fire.

The $42 million buyout and the slow emptying of a town

In 1983, Congress allocated more than $42 million for relocation, and most residents took the buyout. By the end of the 1980s, more than 1,000 people had moved and 500 structures had been demolished. Houses came down block by block. The streets stayed, running past empty lots where homes had stood, so the grid of a town was still readable even as the town itself disappeared.

The census tells the emptying as a steep drop. Centralia had roughly a thousand residents in 1980. By 1990, only 63 people remained, and the fall kept going. At its peak in 1890, this had been a working coal town of 2,761 people. A century of coal built it up. A fire and a federal check took it apart in a decade.

Then the legal machinery moved in. In 1992, Pennsylvania invoked eminent domain on all the remaining property and condemned the whole borough. A town that still had people in it was, on paper, no longer theirs to live in. In 2002, the Postal Service discontinued Centralia’s zip code. You could still drive there. Mailing a letter to it was another matter.

Why some people wouldn’t go

A place is worth something a buyout figure doesn’t fully capture, and that gap is where the holdouts dug in. A handful of residents refused the money and refused to leave, fighting the condemnation in court for years.

From the outside, the choice looks baffling. The ground was smoking. But a home is not only a market value, and the people who stayed had lived their whole lives on those streets.

The fight was not entirely polite. Tom Hynoski, one of the residents who stayed, framed the whole affair as a long grind against a government he did not trust. “They bent us, but they didn’t break us,” he said. Hynoski went further, alleging the relocation was really a scheme to grab the valuable coal beneath the town. Officials have long denied any such plot and pointed to the safety case for moving people off a burning coal seam. We can’t referee that dispute, and we won’t try. What’s clear is that the residents believed they were fighting for something, and they didn’t stop.

$349,500 and the right to die at home

The standoff ended in October 2013. State and local officials reached a settlement allowing the residents to stay for as long as they live. When they die, the properties go back to the state through the eminent-domain process already on the books. The right they won was to stay until the end, not to save the town.

There was cash attached. The eight remaining residents settled for a cash payout of $349,500 between them: $218,000 to compensate residents for the value of their homes and $131,500 for the other claims raised in the lawsuit.

Hynoski’s read was warmer than you might expect from someone who had spent years suing the state. “Everybody got what we wanted, and everybody’s happy now,” he said. The state, for its part, settled a long-running lawsuit and secured the properties for the future, which is a different thing from agreeing that everyone came out happy. The two sides wanted very different outcomes and found a way to stop fighting over them.

Today, only a few people still live in the town. A condemned borough with no zip code, a grid of streets running through grass, and a handful of people living out their years above a fire that will almost certainly outlast all of them. The $42 million bought the removal of a town. The $349,500 bought the right to ignore that the town was gone, for as long as the last holdouts draw breath. When they are gone, the streets and the smoke will still be there, and the fire underneath will keep doing the only thing it has done since 1962.