Word: oils
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Consolidated School educates all the 1,500 children in the sprawling, oil-soaked school districts of London and New London. The primary grades had already been dismissed. But there were 690 boys and girls and 40 teachers still in the spreading story-and-a-half high-school wing. They would have been dismissed in ten minutes, when something, almost certainly natural gas from the bowels of the earth, exploded. Four hundred and fifty-five students and teachers were instantly blown, crushed, torn to death...
Standing by the window in a fifth-grade classroom upstairs was John Nelson's brother Don, a 24-year-old oil worker who was watching over his mother's class of 25 youngsters. He heard a loud noise. Plaster started falling. He thought for a split second of the window. Then two or three of the children started running toward him. He herded them out into the open fast. Out in the schoolyard, Don Nelson saw the ground littered with bodies. Two men ran up to him and they crawled back into the ruins together. A heavy bookcase...
...there was screaming. In a moment oil field workers shut off the pumps under their derricks and came running toward the pile. Fathers and mothers, 100 of whom had been attending a meeting of the Parent-Teachers' Association in the school gymnasium, rushed up white-faced. From the shining school buses lined up to take them home tumbled scores of scared kindergarten moppets to help dig under the debris from which appalling screams and cries could be heard. Slowly the diggers realized the extent of the tragedy as they found they had stretched, at the first count, 220 corpses...
...royalties they brought furnished most of the $1,000,000 which transformed New London's old wooden schoolhouse into one of the finest rural educational plants in the U. S. Still intact were the model home economics kitchens, playgrounds, sewing rooms, laboratories, built by the black crude oil that bubbles richly under the East Texas soil. Natural gas heated the individual classroom radiators in the Consolidated School. Whether it had leaked, in its odorless and highly explosive form, from a radiator or whether it had seeped into the unfinished school basement from the soil, no one seemed to know...
...disaster's cause. Twelve sticks of dynamite discovered in the ruins caused a momentary stir. Superintendent Shaw revealed that "to save about $250 or $350 a month" a connection had been installed by the school janitor to take natural gas from the nearby waste line of the Parade Oil Co., pipe it through the basement to the radiators. Parade officials denied they had given the school permission to make the connection. Mr. Shaw replied that the oil company did not "particularly object." A University of Texas expert, Dr. E. P. Schoch, explained that "if only...