Seventy-five years ago, on March 18, 1937, a gas explosion killed hundreds of people at the Consolidated School in New London, Texas. As noted in a recent edition of Corbett’s Trivia, this incident led to the widespread use of mercaptan as an odorant for natural gas.
Fire Engineering ran a story on the explosion in April 1937. The article contains some information on the fire department response to the tragedy, a dramatic photo of the incident scene, and a photograph of the school before the blast.
Fire Engineering Technical Editor Glenn Corbett dug out the original from the magazine “vault” here in Fair Lawn, and now you can download a copy of it as a PDF HERE (1.88 MB).
To read other past issues of Fire Engineering (our online archive currently goes back to the late ’90s), visit http://www.fireengineering.com/archives.html.
