For Today's Responders, 1937 Texas Tragedy Still Carries Lessons for Avoiding Disaster 

NOAA Office of Response and Restoration
FEBRUARY 17, 2015 -- On March 18, 1937, a gas explosion occurred in a school in New London, Texas, killing almost 300 of the 500 students and 40 teachers in the building. 

The brand new, steel-and-concrete school, located in the East Texas Oilfield, was one of the wealthiest in the country. Yet it was reduced to rubble in part because no one could smell the danger building in the basement.

While the building originally had been designed for a different heat distribution system, school officials had recently approved tapping into a residue gas line of the local Parade Gasoline Company, a common money-saving practice in the oilfield at the time. 

Unfortunately, on that March afternoon, a faulty pipe connection caused the gas (methane mixed with some liquid hydrocarbons) to leak into a closed space beneath the building. Just before class dismissal, when a maintenance employee turned on an electric sander, the odorless gas ignited. The resulting explosion caused the building to collapse, burying victims. (Watch a video of a news reel covering the event from March 1937.)

By standards employed today, a gas leak could be detected in advance by its odor. The odorless gas in the New London disaster was able to accumulate in the space before anyone was aware of it. 

As a direct result of this incident, a Texas law mandated that malodorants be added to all natural gas for commercial and industrial use, a practice that is now an industry standard. Mercaptan, a harmless chemical, gives gas its distinctive rotten egg odor. It is added to natural gas to make it quickly recognizable and to prevent accidents like this from happening.

Read full article: http://response.restoration.noaa.gov/about/media/todays-responders-1937-texas-tragedy-still-carries-lessons-avoiding-disaster.html

Step Back in Time - Videos

1) The New London Story 5:24 March 18, 1937 started out like any other day in the small east Texas town of New London... People did not want to talk about what happened here for forty years...

2) When Even Angels Wept  Trailer  3:00.  The trailer of a  documentary film (2009) by Kristin Beauchamp includes interviews of those who lived to tell their story from that fateful day. Year after year may pass, but their ageless recollections still stand the test of time. 

3) New London Museum 4:23  New London, Texas, was known as the richest independent school district in the United States... Experience the tragedy and triumph as you step back in time with a visit to the London Museum in New London, Texas.  MORE  

 

4) East Texas Oil Museum 4:59  Welcome to the East Texas Oil Museum, located on the campus of Kilgore College in Kilgore, Texas. www.easttexasoilmuseum.com. 

This fascinating museum houses the authentic re-creation of oil discovery and production in the early 1930s from the largest oil field inside U.S. boundaries. Here, visitors see the people, their towns, their personal habits, their tools and their pastimes -- all colorfully depicted in dioramas, movies, sound presentations and actual antiques donated by East Texas citizens.

Step across the city limits into Boomtown, USA, --a full scaletown full of stores, people, animals, and machinery depicting the lively activity of a town booming in oil... MORE

Our History: The Villa Rica Explosion

Twelve people perished in the Dec. 5, 1957 natural gas blast in downtown Villa Rica.

http://douglasville.patch.com/groups/editors-picks/p/our-history-the-villa-rica-explosion

The fateful day was Thursday, December 5, 1957. People were going about their normal business on a weekday...going to the store, keeping appointments, seeing to some early Christmas shopping. Some folks were simply out to cast their ballot in municipal elections going on at the time, but shortly after 11 a.m., a natural gas explosion took the lives of 12 people and injured at least 20 others...changing the lives of so many in an instant.

In 1997, the 40th anniversary of the explosion, the Douglas Sentinel published an article recounting that fateful day. Many folks remembered the sound of the explosion...“a loud whoomp, that was more like a clap than a bang...and others said that the town suddenly looked as if it had been hit by an atom bomb.”

The Villa Rica Explosion

http://mymindisongeorgia.blogspot.com/2008/12/villa-rica-explosion.html

Around 11:00 a.m. on December 5, 1957, a natural gas leak under Berry’s Pharmacy caused an explosion that destroyed four buildings and damaged several others in Villa Rica’s downtown. The explosion killed twelve and injured twenty. The tragedy highlighted the need for both an organized local emergency response unit and the use of odor in the natural gas supply.  

Newsreel 1957 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpe9V4pzUVY

Photo slideshow http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klRWphf0-YA

Tragedy in '57: Newly found photos depict Villa Rica disaster, December 5, 2013  

http://www.times-georgian.com/villa-rican/article_29c0090e-5dbc-11e3-b5b5-001a4bcf6878.html

In 2013, the damage is long repaired, but the tragedy won’t ever be forgotten.

“It was tragic, sad, but it’s our history and we need to remember those that were killed,” said Bailey. “We need to remember the lessons learned.”

More

Incident v. Impact: Why Leading a Safety Culture Matters 11/10/13 

by SBI, safetyBUILT-IN (a division of SCInc.) is a safety-leadership learning and development company.  

What do we think about safety and what do we believe about it?  Is it a compliance policy that we follow and enforce, or is a culture that we live and lead?  Here is an excerpt from our two-day safety-leadership workshop, “From Compliance to Culture,” that helps illustrate the difference.

The video relates a story I have often shared in my safety-leadership sessions to call attention to the abject deficiencies in how we tend to view safety in an organization.

Too often we speak of safety in the language of incidents rather than impact.  The former allows us to distance ourselves too easily and too neatly from the full impact of what happens when someone gets injured or killed on the job.

But by reevaluating how we view safety and what we believe about it–especially in light of the impact an injury or death has on those who are left behind–we can begin to build and lead a safety culture in more effective ways.  Watch the video below for the full explanation.  

VIDEO http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mQRbxdhMrE

Odor now added to natural gas
http://www.news-journal.com/news/content/news/stories/03192007_london_gas_odor.html

By MIKE ELSWICK  Monday, March 19, 2007

If a positive angle can be found in the tragic explosion of the London School on March 18, 1937, it could be that hundreds, if not thousands, of lives have probably been saved as a result, according to Archie McDonald.

"The major positive that came from the New London school explosion was legislation requiring gas companies to add an odor to their product so anyone can determine when natural gas is leaking or not properly utilized," said McDonald, a historian long associated with Stephen F. Austin State University who has researched the topic.

Naturally, natural gas has no odor. The smell today many associate with the release of natural gas comes from a malodorant agent added to the gas just for the purpose of allowing it to be smelled should a leak develop.

What some people describe as a rotting cabbage smell usually associated with natural gas comes not from natural gas itself but from mercaptans, which are added to natural gas during processing.

The London School can be credited with instigating, or at least speeding up and stimulating, laws resulting in requiring the odor agent to be added, McDonald said.

The April 1937 edition of the Quarterly of the National Fire Protection Association ran a 14-page summary of the London School disaster of the previous month. Among the conclusions in the report prepared by H. Oram Smith with the Texas Inspection Bureau, was that "the value of a distinctive malodorant in all gas supply systems by which leaking gas may be readily detected is clearly evident."

Smith wrote there was only one explosion associated with the disaster and no fire.

"Yet there is evidence of a most terrific force in the great extent of devastation and loss of life that came almost instantly; testimony of bodies tossed 75 feet in the air; an automobile 200 feet distant crushed like an eggshell under a two-ton slab of concrete that had been hurled from the building," Smith wrote. He said at the established point of origin of the blast the explosion had to "break through an 8-inch concrete floor slab before starting on its path of destruction."

In the Texas Railroad Commission archives covering a summary of the agency's activities in the 1930s was an item indicating enforcement of the new rules requiring odorants was enacted, said Ramona Nye, spokeswoman for the agency.

"As a result of this tragedy, the 45th Legislature enacted House Bill 1017 ... giving the Railroad Commission the authority to adopt rules and regulations pertaining to the odorization of natural gas or liquefied petroleum gases," the commission archives said. "On July 27, 1937, Gas Utilities Docket 122 was adopted and the commission began enforcement of odorization requirements for natural gas."

In May 1937, the Texas Railroad Commission, at the time referred to as the most powerful board of resource regulators in the world, had passed an order in memory of those killed in New London that continues to impact the lives of people worldwide.

Shortly after the disaster, the Texas Legislature met in emergency session and enacted the Engineering Registration Act, now rewritten as the Texas Engineering Practice Act. Public pressure was on the government to regulate the practice of engineering because of the faulty installation of the natural gas connection at the London School believed to have resulted in the natural gas leak.

Many other states soon enacted rules requiring an odorant be added to natural gas, and later in 1937 federal requirements were made law, Smith said.

According to the Texas Railroad Commission, the odorants are considered non-toxic in the extremely low concentrations occurring in natural gas delivered to the end user.

Successful Strategies for Creating a Culture of Laboratory Safety
by Bryan Connors, M.S., C.I.H., H.E.M.

Felony charges have been filed against the University of California and a University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) chemistry professor in connection with a laboratory fire that killed a staff research assistant three years ago. The L.A. County district attorney’s office has filed criminal charges against the chemistry professor responsible for the training and supervision of the research assistant, and the regents of the University of California with three counts each of willfully violating occupational health and safety standards, resulting in the research assistant’s death. 

This tragedy has prompted universities and biotech facilities across the nation to scrutinize their own laboratory safety programs to ensure that they are adequately protecting employees from injury. EH&E manages environmental health and safety (EH&S) programs for several large research institutions in Boston and Cambridge, MA and understands these concerns. Similar incidents reported by the media have driven our staff to conduct internal reviews of our own programs to identify vulnerabilities and make improvements. This article offers insights from our internal reviews and resulting efforts on strategies we’ve found to be successful at improving safety program performance...

Continue reading here

 

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Environmental Health and Engineering Webinar

Best Practice Strategies for Laboratory Safety Programs 

2/7/12 EST   Pice: $0.00

Learn best practices and proven strategies for implementing, maximizing, and tracking the effectiveness of lab safety management programs. 

More information

Registration Deadline:  2/7/2012 10:00:00 AM 


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Lessons of the Challenger Disaster

Keeping quiet about a problem can lead to disastrous consequences. Study these lessons. Break the silence.

As many safety heroes know, it often takes enormous persistence and courage to take leadership for safety...and overcome indifference to a wide range of health and safety issues.  See Feed Your Heroic Imagination

Deadly space lessons go unheeded  Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia tragedies have much in common, By James Oberg NBC News space analyst  ..."But the internal hazards -- what investigation boards have called the "flawed safety culture" -- have proven much more insidious. This is the realm of convenient assumptions, of complacency, of willfulness, of use of statistical superstitions, of a false familiarity with an unblinking foe. It is a culture made possible by an all-too-human aversion to facing unpleasantness. It has become easy to look away from these horrible space disasters -- and I never call them "accidents," a term that relieves the people involved on the ground of ultimate responsibility.

See Eliminating Cultures of Silence  "Sadly, before each disaster, stake holders saw clear warning signs for catastrophe and yet they said nothing. Trends show that similar cultures of silence proliferate in organizations across the country....The good news is that organizations who successfully handle these five issues transform cultures of silence into cultures of honesty and effective communication—eliminating potential catastrophes and saving lives."

Teachers who enforce safety rules not only avoid accidents in school but they give their students the skills and attitudes necessary to safeguard their future families and co-workers and "to live safer healthier longer lives."  (Jim Kaufman, Lab Safety Institute) 

... Silence begets silence. The bigger the silence, the more powerful it is. Silence can become so  all-encompassing that one is not even aware of it.  In such instances, entire constellations of thoughts, questions and conversations simply do not arise.  Or, if they do, the pervasiveness of the silence makes them seem dangerous. Perhaps the last person who tried to break the silence got in trouble, perhaps she became a pariah, perhaps she lost her job. --  Beyond Erin Brockovitch By Sonja Biorn-Hansen, in Rachel's Environment & Health News #815, http://www.rachel.org/?q=en/node/6438.  Sonja Biorn-Hansen an Environmental Engineer with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

"...those normally charged with protecting a school from liability (and its occupants from harm), ...may not be familiar with the scope of the risks. Too often, people with only a cursory understanding of the issues will consider themselves experts. Familiarity may also be surprisingly limited among those to whom a school generally turns for advice on health issues, such as school nurses, industrial hygienists, HVAC companies, consulting firms and health departments ...More often than not, they will under-emphasize the risks and over-emphasize the costs (and the inconveniences) of responding to a perceived problem."  "Legal Aspects of Pollution in Schools," Earon Davis, The Healthy School Handbook, National Education Association, 1995.

Press Release: New Data Shows Schools Ignore Children's Health: Groups Urge Action by EPA and States    Healthy Schools Network Executive Director Claire Barnett warns, “Parents are stunned when they discover schools have known about environmental factors affecting their child and have done little or nothing. Then they learn that no agency responds either. Every effort should be made to intervene when children are in harm’s way.”

Bring the Science of Chemical Safety to Your School 

Leadership in Science: Teaching Safely and Teaching Safety