Hello ladies and gentleman. This is the ambassador of South Korea. In South Korea, we are having a holiday! Yesterday was Children's Day, today is temporary holiday and tomorrow is weekend. Even more, my high school has sports day and short vacation so I will have quite a long break. The weather is very clear, tons of flowers are blooming and I bet most of you would be enjoying this beautiful days. It seems like I should report something positive, but for today, I want to introduce a tragic situation which has been lasted over fifty years.

     Do you know the city Centralia, located in Pennsylvania? Originally, Centralia used to be one of the most famous places for mining industry. Once Centralia started to be developed as a coal mine field, the population has increased up to 2700. Sadly however, this city has been on fire over fifty years. 

     The history goes back to May 27^th 1962. People lighted a fire at a garbage incineration plant in Centralia. After the incineration, people thought that they had extinguished the fire completely, however, that wasn't true and the fire moved to coal nearby. People tried to extinguish it by pouring forty thousand liters of water but that wasn't easy. It is very hard to fire anthracite, but once it is fired, it is very hard to be extinguished. Eventually, they gave up and wished the fire to die naturally. One day in 1979, one man measured the temperature of the oil repository located underground by chance. The temperature appeared to be abnormally high which was not logically acceptable. Even more, the temperature of 10m below the tank rated 527 Celsius. Government concluded that the high temperature is due to the fire that has started 17 years ago, so they tried to put it out. However, since the fire was going underground and the fact that they cannot actually 'see' it made firefighters difficult to extinguish it. Since then, the fire is being on progress.

     Due to the continuous fire, roads are being sunk and toxic smoke like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide is emitted. Since 1984, government has executed deportation so almost all the residents have moved and the zip code is deleted. Now, Centralia is called 'ghost town'. Experts assume that the fire is going to last for more than 250 years.

     This accident shows how small mistake made by humans can affect the whole city environmentally, economically and so on. In case of Centralia, the whole living things are dying and the ground is becoming more and weaker. The toxic smoke emitted there pollutes the air and resources like coal is being wasted. From the story of Centralia, we can know that a small movement of humans can lead to disastrous happening. I insist that we, humans should be more careful toward the nature. Nature and environment is not a thing that we can control as want. Thanks///