Today’s Horrible Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
On March 17, 1937, an oilfield worker named George Davidson dreamed of tragedy. History doesn’t record exactly what kind of tragedy he dreamed about, but the dream upset him enough that he told his work friends about it the next morning. Some of them reminded him of the old superstition that one shouldn’t ever tell a dream before breakfast for fear that it will come true.
At just after three P.M. that day, Davidson, along with everyone else in New London, Texas, heard the thunderous roar of an explosion. It was not the sound of an exploding oil tank, which they’d grown accustomed to since the oil boom began. It was the town’s pride and joy, the New London Consolidated School, one of the largest in the world at the time and built five years earlier at a cost of $15.7 million in today’s dollars.
First through fourth grades had already been dismissed, but fifth through twelfth graders were still inside the school, which had recently decided to save money by tapping into the oil company’s natural-gas residue pipe. The oil companies considered natural gas a waste product and so, while the practice of tapping into the residue line was not strictly legal, it was tolerated. The trouble was that the raw, “wet” gas varied in quality throughout the day, and since it was untreated, it was difficult to detect leaks. The students and teachers at the New London school had been noticing headaches in recent days, but no one made the connection between the headaches and the gas line. In fact, the gas line was leaking into the crawlspace under the school, and that afternoon, when the shop teacher, Lemmie Butler, turned on his electric sander in his basement classroom, the spark ignited this gas.
The walls of the school bulged outward, the roof lifted off and then came crashing down, flattening the main part of the school. A two-ton concrete block was thrown clear and crushed a car. Parents attending a PTA meeting in an adjacent building rushed to the scene, along with oilfield workers and other residents, and began frantically digging through the rubble, many with their bare hands. Police and firefighters from many nearby towns were called in, as well as Texas Rangers, National Guardsmen, and soldiers and airmen from local bases. The area was placed under martial law and every available building was pressed into service as a morgue or a hospital, every available vehicle as a hearse or ambulance.
Even reporters arriving at the site of the disaster were put to work digging bodies out of the ruined school building. A young United Press reporter named Walter Cronkite was one of these men, and though he was go on to cover the action in World War II, the Nuremberg trials and Vietnam, he would always maintain that the New London tragedy was the most heartbreaking story he had ever covered. No one is sure of the exact number of lives that were lost that day; estimates range from 296 to 319, but it’s likely the toll was even higher, since many of the town’s residents were transient oilfield workers who collected their own dead and took them to their hometowns for burial.
George Davidson, the man who’d dreamed of some tragedy befalling the town, and who’d told of his dream before breakfast, would later stumble into a makeshift morgue and identify his own three children’s bodies: Joe Wheeler Davidson, 15; Helen, 13; and Annie Laurie, 11.
The New London explosion remains the worst school-related disaster in American history, and the third-worst disaster of any kind in Texas, eclipsed only by the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and the Texas City harbor explosions in 1947.
Culled from Gen Disasters
Submitted by: Aimee
Ghastly: Asphyxia By Drowning Edition
One of the first morbid books I ever acquired was Vernon G. Geberth’s Practical Homicide Investigation: Tactics, Procedures, and Forensic Techniques (Practical Aspects of Criminal and Forensic Investigations)
HOMICIDE: ASPHYXIA BY DROWNING
Although rare, drowning can be employed as a means of homicide. Observe the body of a victim immersed in the water of a bathtub. The deceased’s hands have been bound and the body lies face down in the water. (The water has been discolored by the victim’s blood.) This slaying took place after a “crew” decided to rip-off the victim. (A crew is best defined as a loosely knit association of street kids, whose sole occupation is criminal behavior.) The victim had been set up by a couple of street girls, who promised the victim sex. They kept him busy while the male members of the the crew broke into the victim’s apartment. The victim was then tortured by the crew members who, after ransacking the apartment, eventually drowned him.