Texas School Tragedy Of 294 Dead Recalled |
The death in a Chicago school fire Monday of 90 persons sent horrified memory racing back 21 years to New London, Texas, an oil field town in the piney woods and sandy hills of East Texas. |
The world's worst school tragedy occurred there March 18, 1937, killing 294 children and teachers. Gas had collected in a sub-basement and it apparently was ignited by a spark from the switch of a sanding machine in the manual training room located by the side of a door into the sub-basement. |
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It was all over in seconds. There was no fire. Three-quarters, of the building-only a corner was left standing-went straight up. |
The building, reduced to concrete slabs, steel beams and debris, collapsed. It crushed the children who had no chance to seek escape. Only three bodies suffered burns, indicating the collapsing building snuffed out the flames. |
As the second newspaperman on the scene, after speeding from a town 18 miles away, I came upon a scene of almost complete silence. There was some whispering from those who were injured but the injured were very few. Most of the children of junior and senior high school age were either killed outright or escaped with bruises. |
By the time I got there, the narrow roads were crowded with ambulances front 15 neighboring towns and by heavy earth-moving equipment bulldozers and cranes to lift the building off the crushed bodies There was to have been a PTA meeting that afternoon and mothers had begun to drive or walk towards the building in bright spring sunshine. |
Many saw the building which was a modern school, erected with oil money some from six wells on the school grounds, disintegrate before their eyes. |
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They ran toward the building and the appalling silence. As bodies were brought from the debris, they were lined up along side an athletic field fence uncovered and in the grotesque positions of the recently dead. |
One turned his face away and looked up to the steelwork of what remained of one comer of the third floor. Men supported in the bucket of a crane were at work, trying to pry loose the body of a blond teen-age girl, a body which had been impaled on torn, jagged steel. |
This was not an old school. It had been completed less than two years before. It was strong and fireproof. But it was heated by wild gas, unmetered cheap and varying in pressure as it came from the wells. |
Apparently there was a gas leak in the connections under the building and the gas had collected there. |
The bodies were taken to makeshift morgues and the injured to hospitals in a dozen towns round about. |
In red sand cemeteries all over the area are graves whose headstones all bear the same date and birth dates indicating how brief can be the span of life. In the memories of many remains the example, the worst in history, of the senselessness of fate and the remorseless tragedy which can come from carelessness. |