New London, Nineteen Thirty-Seven: The Explosion That Changed Gas Forever
Near Midland Odessa, Texas
Approximately two hundred ninety eight students and teachers died on March eighteenth, nineteen thirty-seven, in a school building in New London, Texas, in Rusk County, roughly four hundred miles east of Midland. The New London School explosion was not a Permian Basin event. But it was an oil-country event, and it changed the way every American lives with natural gas.
New London was one of the richest school districts in the United States in the mid-nineteen thirties, despite the Great Depression, because Rusk County had struck oil in nineteen thirty. The London School was a large steel-and-concrete structure built in nineteen thirty-two at a cost of one million dollars. The school board, looking to save money, had canceled its commercial natural gas contract and instructed plumbers to tap into an oil company's residue gas line instead. The practice was widespread in the oil patch. The natural gas extracted alongside oil was considered waste and was flared off. Tapping into it was free, and the companies looked the other way.
The problem was that unprocessed natural gas is odorless. There is no smell to warn you that it is accumulating. Gas had been leaking from the tapped line for some time, building up in the enclosed crawlspace that ran beneath the entire main wing of the school. Students had been complaining of headaches. No one took it seriously.
At three seventeen in the afternoon, a shop instructor named Lemmie Butler switched on an electric sander. The spark ignited the gas-air mixture. The roof lifted from the walls and crashed back down. The main wing collapsed. The explosion was heard four miles away.
Walter Cronkite arrived as a young reporter for United Press International. He later said he did nothing in his studies nor in his life to prepare him for a story of that magnitude, and that no story since had equaled it.
Within weeks of the explosion, the Texas Legislature required that a sulfur compound called mercaptan be added to all natural gas, giving it the distinctive smell that warns of leaks to this day. The odor you associate with gas is the legacy of New London.
