Elbert Box went back through his 1936 London School yearbook after the explosion and began putting small x’s beside photographs.
The marks were for students who had died.
Box had been inside the school himself. He was a senior sitting in geometry class when the building came apart. Twenty-two students had been in the room; four survived. Box suffered multiple injuries, including a broken femur that developed gas gangrene. Doctors amputated his right leg on April 26. He was still in the hospital when his diploma arrived in May.
London School never published a 1937 yearbook. A memorial volume took its place.
Box kept the previous year’s book and added the x’s.
A school built by oil
The East Texas oil boom had made the New London district unusually wealthy. Its large, steel-framed school was relatively new and modern by local standards. The disaster was not the failure of an obviously derelict building; the hazard came from the fuel system beneath it.
Its heating system had originally purchased gas commercially. In January 1937, however, school officials authorized a connection to a nearby residue-gas line belonging to the Parade Gasoline Company, a practice that was not unusual in the East Texas oilfield. The change reportedly saved the district about $300 a month.
Investigators later concluded that gas escaped from the school’s system and accumulated in an enclosed space beneath the building.
Nobody inside had a smell to warn them.
The phrase “natural gas smell” is so normal now that it is easy to forget the smell is not the gas. PHMSA describes natural gas in its natural state as odorless, colorless and tasteless. Distribution systems add an odorant specifically so a leak can be noticed.
The switch
The precise minute of the explosion is less certain than later retellings sometimes suggest. The U.S. Bureau of Mines investigation placed it at about 3:05 p.m. The Bullock Museum’s artifact history uses 3:15. A number of later accounts use 3:17.
I do not think much is gained by forcing those records into agreement.
The important sequence is more stable. Students were finishing the school day. In the manual-training area, instructor Lemmie R. Butler operated electrical equipment. Investigators concluded that a spark associated with the sanding machine or its switch ignited the gas-air mixture that had collected beneath the structure. Butler had no reason to know he was standing over a flammable atmosphere.
The explosion lifted sections of the building and dropped them back into themselves. Steel, brick, concrete and timber collapsed into classrooms. The blast was heard miles away. The school that had looked so substantial in photographs was suddenly a pile of structural material with people inside it.
The numbers became unreliable almost immediately
The first casualty reports were terrible and inconsistent. They stayed that way.
The Bureau of Mines report, issued in 1937, counted 280 pupils and 14 teachers, or 294 deaths. The Handbook of Texas uses approximately 298. The Texas State Library describes the victims more cautiously as roughly 300, with children forming the majority.
Other historical tallies rise still higher by including people who died later from injuries. I would use “nearly 300” rather than present a false precision the surviving institutional sources themselves do not share.
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The scale does not need embellishment. Oilfield workers were among the first people to reach the wreckage. As news spread through the region, at least 2,000 workers were eventually at the site moving debris and searching for students and teachers. Floodlights went up. Rescue work continued through the night.
Hospitals, law enforcement, oil companies, military personnel, the Red Cross and volunteers converged on a community that hours earlier had simply been waiting for school to let out.
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Some of the survivors were children who had been sitting inches or feet from people who died. Elbert Box was one of them. His injuries would follow him out of the building and into a hospital bed for the rest of the school year.
The investigation under the floor
Federal and state investigators arrived quickly. The Bureau of Mines published a 44-page investigation that mapped the school, surrounding pipelines, oil wells and gas lines and examined the physical circumstances of the explosion. Its contemporary death total differs slightly from later Texas sources, but it remains one of the essential primary technical records of the disaster.
Investigators concluded that gas had collected in the large enclosed space beneath the school. The connection to the residue-gas system became a central part of the inquiry. The Handbook of Texas says the escaping gas was traced to a faulty connection.
Using residue gas from oilfield operations was sufficiently ordinary in the area that the arrangement apparently did not look reckless to the people making it. The school itself was modern by local standards. The danger existed partly because a familiar fuel could occupy an enclosed space without announcing its presence.
After New London, Texas required gas odorization
New London directly changed Texas gas regulation. In 1937, House Bill 1017 gave the Railroad Commission authority to regulate odorization of natural gas and liquefied petroleum gases. A separate law that year established professional-engineer registration in Texas.
Those are two different responses to the same catastrophe. One tried to make an invisible hazard easier for ordinary people to detect. The other tried to formalize who was professionally responsible for engineering work.
There is a useful comparison here with Final Vestige’s The Hoses That Wouldn’t Fit. Both stories involve an ordinary technical standard whose importance becomes conspicuous only after catastrophe, without making the two disasters otherwise equivalent.
One-fifth
The odorization idea did not remain a historical footnote in Texas.
Current federal pipeline regulations require combustible gas in a distribution line either to contain a natural odorant or to be odorized so that it is readily detectable by a person with a normal sense of smell when its concentration in air reaches one-fifth of the lower explosive limit. Operators are also required to monitor odorant effectiveness.
That is an extraordinarily precise regulatory descendant of an extraordinarily simple problem. Someone needs to know the gas is there before there is enough of it to explode.
PHMSA’s current emergency guidance also tells people who suspect a gas leak not to operate electrical switches or other devices that could create an ignition source. Read beside New London’s manual-training shop, that instruction does not need commentary from me.
The x’s
Elbert Box’s yearbook survives. The Bullock Museum describes the little marks he added beside photographs of classmates who did not survive March 18. The artifact itself belongs to the London Museum, which is why I would not reproduce it here without a clearer reuse permission even though it would be the most obvious visual choice.
The object can carry the opening without our needing to appropriate its image.
The modern regulation is considerably less moving to look at. It is just a paragraph of federal text. Gas in a distribution line must be detectable by smell at one-fifth of the lower explosive limit.
The gas beneath London School had no such warning.
Sources & Further Reading
- U.S. Bureau of Mines, Explosion in School Building at New London, Tex., March 18, 1937. The principal federal technical investigation of the gas explosion.
- Texas State Library and Archives Commission, “New London School Explosion”. Texas archival material, relief correspondence and post-disaster reforms.
- Bullock Texas State History Museum, “1936 London School Yearbook”. Elbert Box’s survival, injuries and yearbook markings.
- Texas State Historical Association, “New London School Explosion”. Institutional synthesis of the oilfield setting, heating-system change and rescue.
- Railroad Commission of Texas, RRC History. The post-New London odorization authority.
- 49 CFR §192.625, Odorization of Gas. The current federal odorization requirement.