Out of Tragedy.....A Terrible Smell

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Rotten eggs. They always tell you that, if you smell rotten eggs, there's a gas leak. That hasn't always been the case. Natural gas is, in its "normal" condition, odorless. The "rotten egg" smell is an additive. It was brought about after a terrible tragedy. On March 18, 1937, an undetected natural gas leak at the London Consolidated School in New London, Texas, caused a massive explosion that leveled most of the main building. Nearly three hundred individuals, they think, died. Most of them were children in the fifth through eleventh grades. "They think." This area of Texas was home to oil fields, meaning lots of transient workers were in the area. Unlike today, where children are all but fingerprinted before they start school, detailed records weren't kept. (Plus, this was the height of the Depression, so people moved frequently.) The actual death toll is not known. Newspaper headlines declared anywhere from 288 to 700 children were killed. The county called it "the day a generation died," given the high number of children who perished. Out of that tragedy, a terrible smell emerged. The "rotten egg" smell was added to natural gas to hopefully prevent any similar catastrophes in the future. That's one of the sad things about life: many "safety measures" that we take for granted have, as their origins, terrible disasters. A Texas TV station video interviewing survivors of the 1937 explosion: