Abstract Centralia is in Pennsylvania’s western middle anthracite field, a large synclinorium in Columbia and Schuylkill Counties. Centralia residents set fire to a landfill at the edge of town in 1962, thereby igniting the Buck Mountain coal bed. Laurel Run is in Pennsylvania’s northern anthracite field, on the northwest-dipping limb of the Wyoming Valley syncline. In 1915, a miner’s abandoned carbide lamp started a fire at Laurel Run, igniting the Red Ash, Top Red Ash, and Bottom Ross coal beds. The Centralia and Laurel Run fires are burning out of control. Subsidence and the venting of toxic gases have destroyed large sections of each community. Because the Centralia fire started in the hinge zone of an anticline separating two synclines in the Western Middle Field, it spread in four directions. The Laurel Run fire occurred on one limb of a syncline, limiting its spread to two directions. At Centralia, the steeper-dipping beds permitted the fire to reach a greater depth more rapidly than at Laurel Run. In addition, the point of origin and steeper dip at Centralia make this fire more difficult to control, even though only one coal bed is burning. A historical and sociological comparison of both communities shows that the people of Laurel Run had greater access to political power and more experience as a community in dealing with crises. Laurel Run secured more government support in combating the fire than Centralia did and so emerged from the fire as a more socially intact community. The present state of each fire further underscores how different geologic settings and social conditions can lead to different outcomes.

Abstract The conduct of the elected representatives of the Eleventh Congressional District of Pennsylvania in dealing with two fires at two separate times permits greater understanding of the transition zone between inaction and action in congressional policy making. In 1984, Congress passed a bill that provided funds to relocate the citizens of Centralia, Pennsylvania, while ignoring the citizens in Laurel Run, Pennsylvania. Both communities were plagued by structural damage from the coal fires burning under their towns. In contrast, citizens from both communities had received government assistance in 1966 in the form of Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grants during earlier flare-ups of both fires. Both Pennsylvania senators and the Eleventh Congressional District representative all had less seniority in the 1980s than had been the case for the individuals holding those seats in the 1960s. Divided government made policy influence less certain and consensus more difficult to achieve in the 1980s, and the range of policy templates available for adaptation was more restricted in the 1980s. In 1966, a senior representative operating within a solid majority government could convince officials at HUD to adapt urban renewal legislation to assist constituents whose houses were structurally unsound because of the fires. In 1984, the policy templates had changed to toxic waste and environmental protection, affording inexperienced representatives working in a divided government no suitable argument to justify a bureaucratic solution to the coal fires. The resulting legislative-policy solution was limited to the constituents in acute distress in Centralia.