Why can't they put the fire out of Centralia, Pennsylvania?

The fire is undergroundf. Too dangerous to fight. I was in the town on top of it, there’s nothing there.

Coal mines stretch for miles and miles underground, and there’s no way for humans to get in there and fight the fire. They would die (no air).

At one point they considered putting water down the main to smother the fire, but it’s too big, and being underground, too many places the water would drain.

It will be burning forever.

Are there other places like this on earth? Could this be how notions of a fiery hell underground became lodged in our cultural consciousness, at least for those of us with cultural origins threaded through Europe?

Cut and pasted from Wikipedia:

In popular culture

Road damage and graffiti on abandoned section of PA Route 61

Abandoned section of Railroad Avenue in Centralia, 2016
Centralia has been used as a model for many different fictional ghost towns and manifestations of Hell. Prominent examples include Dean Koontz’s Strange Highways and David Wellington’s Vampire Zero.[49]

Screenwriter Roger Avary researched Centralia while working on the screenplay for the Silent Hill film adaptation.[50]

The 1982 PBS documentary Centralia Mine Fire contains interviews with residents and relates the story of the mine fire.[51]

The 1987 film Made in U.S.A. opens in Centralia and the surrounding coal region of Pennsylvania.[52]

The 2007 documentary The Town That Was is about the history of the town and its current and former residents.[53]

Centralia had a segment entitled “City on Fire” on the Travel Channel television series America Declassified which aired in 2013.[54]

The Centralia story was explored in the documentary segment “Dying Embers” from public radio station WNYC’s Radiolab.[55]

The American history comedy podcast The Dollop featured an episode in 2015 discussing Centralia.[56]

The setting of the 1991 film Nothing But Trouble starring Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd was set in a fictional town “Valkenvania” based on Centralia.[57]

The song “Perpetual Flame of Centralia” featured on the 2021 album Sinner Get Ready by Lingua Ignota derives both its title and lyrical themes from the town and its mine fire.[58]

See also

A berm blocks entry to the abandoned section of Route 61
Coal seam fires
Brennender Berg (Saarland, Germany)
Burning Mountain (New South Wales, Australia)
Darvaza gas crater (Derweze, Turkmenistan)
Jharia (India)
Smoking Hills (Northwest Territories, Canada)
Arkwright Town
Involuntary park
Love Canal, Niagara Falls, New York
Namie, Fukushima
Picher, Oklahoma
Pripyat, Ukraine
Times Beach, Missouri
Wittenoom, Western Australia

Enough water could never be flooded into the old coal mines to snuff the flames. It would drain out faster than you could pump it in.

Sounds like that old scary video game Silent Hill.