The Sad Story of Why Natural Gas Stinks

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Have you ever wondered why natural gas has that awful, rotten egg-like smell to it? In its “normal” state, natural gas has no smell or color or taste. The odor was put there artificially after a horrific tragedy. Today I visited the location of that disaster: the town of New London, Texas. Eastern Texas is hill country, timber country, and oil country. One of the largest oil wells ever opened near New London. The area was rich with oil money, even during the Depression, and in 1932 they built a combination junior and senior high school for grades 5-11 (there was no 12th grade then in Texas). Five years later, on March 18, 1937, a spark from a sander in a shop class caused collected natural gas to explode with such force that it sent debris into the sky and back down onto the building, putting out the fire that had started so quickly that only one room (the shop class) suffered any fire. The force of the explosion, however, tore the school to shreds. The final tally was 311 fatalities, most of them students. One of the websites dedicated to preserving the history of the event calls it “the day a generation died,” and that’s no exaggeration. The museum volunteer who led two classes of students from the school that stands on the same property as the original New London School (but not on the same footprint) told the kids that over thirty sets of parents had to bury two or more children…including five couples who lost every child. The museum is very respectful of the story. It shows a scale model of the 1932 school building, what desks looked like at the time, and even had a photo of the sander that sparked, causing the explosion. Other walls were lined with enlargements of newspaper headlines, many grossly inflating the number of dead (as if the actual tally wasn’t horrible enough). Another display showed the telegrams of sympathy sent from all over the world, including one from Adolf Hitler. A mock-up of a hospital room from the era showed what the survivors would have been treated with, including tetanus and gangrene immunizations (as antibiotics were quite rare in those days, not coming into widespread medical use until World War II). Videos show the newsreel coverage and an actual 8 mm film taken of children doing a dance for the PTA meeting — thankfully held in another building on the campus and not in the school itself — at the time of the explosion. All of this was caused by natural gas, which at the time, only caused a few complaints of nausea and headaches. It couldn’t be smelled. After the disaster, however, Texas legislature quickly passed a law mandating that an artificial odorizer be put in natural gas to prevent such a tragedy from ever occurring again. Millions of lives have been saved as a result of that putrid odor. However, the safety measure came at a terrible cost. COLLAGE: (Left) Cenotaph, located in the median between the London Museum and the property where the school stood (and the current school is) (Top Right) Newspaper photograph showing over 1,500 people working through the night to clear the debris. In less than 24 hours every piece of shattered building had been moved. (Bottom right) The horrible reality showing the number of victims based on the school grade they were in.