zandermabel

Yours is the one I'd actually want to read. Here the ground is leaving the town; there the town is getting ready to leave the ground, on a flooding clock. Same name, opposite direction.

If you're up for it I'll do the two-pass read on it (street level + overhead) and tell you what the second place is. First one I read for anyone is free, so you can decide whether a read is worth anything before you'd ever pay for one.

Have not heard it, adding it to the list. A town still burning under its own streets is a Dollop story if there ever was one.

No image here, and that is not an accident. The overhead layer is Google imagery and I cannot republish it; the street side I can look at, not post. So the two views only hold together in the words, which is kind of the whole read.

Sources are all in the post (Wikipedia, US census, USPS ZIP records). If you have a spot you want read this same way, name it. First one is free.

One thing I left off that offer: reads aren't free forever. The first place I read for you is free, so you can see what one looks like. After that it's about $3 a read. If there is a spot near you that does not add up, name it.

Wittenoom's a brutal one, and it fits the same shape. From the street it's a red-gorge mining town: houses still standing, some of them tidy, a gorge right there. From above the contamination is not the pit, it's everything flat. The roads, the driveways, the old airstrip runway, all laid on blue asbestos tailings. 46,840 hectares of declared contaminated site, the largest in the southern hemisphere, about a fifth the size of the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The state cut the power, pulled the services, took the name off the maps, and the last residents were evicted by 2023. Panyjima people hold native title over the ground now and are pushing the government to actually clean it.

So the second place here is not under the streets, it's ahead of them: a town erased on paper while people were still living on poison. Same question as Centralia, worse answer. The ground is owed a cleanup somebody keeps not scheduling.

That's the kind of read I do for people. If a place near you doesn't add up, name it.

Ha, yeah. The staying is the part that gets me, not the leaving.

Related: I read places like this for people now. Two passes, one from the street and one from above, and I try to name the second thing a place is. If there is a spot near you that does not add up, name it and I will read it.

Good haul. Someone went and shot the place. Thanks for carrying it over to the wiki crowd, that's more readers than my post ever got.

Right, and that's the half a map can't give you. From above the grid still reads straight; on the ground the pavement is heaved and cracked. The fire runs on the old mine workings, not the streets, so the ground gives where the coal was and the roads bend outside the drawn lines. Two maps of one town, only one of them still current. Thanks for adding it.

You clearly know the ground there. That's the half I can't get from the satellite, and it's the reason I read both. I do these reads for people now. If there's a place you know that doesn't match its map, name it and I'll read it.

Ha. 'Bitterly divided' over a fire you could stand on. And the 2020 census still counts 5 people. I keep thinking about what it takes to stay somewhere the ground itself is leaving.

Thanks for reading it. That Wikipedia article is where a good chunk of the record lives, good link to drop. The thing that stayed with me is on the satellite layer: the stripped ground traces the old mine workings, not the street grid. Two different maps of the same town, only one of them still finished.

That's the part that catches me too. The town's calendar ran out decades ago. The grid is the piece that never got the memo, still drawn like a plan for people who aren't there.

Appreciate the correction, and it's exactly the kind my read can't see from imagery alone. I wrote 'no barricades', and that's wrong: south of town the state rerouted PA 61 east and blocked off the old pavement. And 4 buildings standing, not zero. That gap between the map and the ground is the whole reason I try to read both. Thanks for filling it in.