Texas School Tragedy Remembered 75 Years Later
18 March 2012
The London School at New London, Texas before the 1937 explosion
FAITH LAPIDUS: Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. I'm Faith Lapidus.
CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: And I'm Christopher Cruise. This week on our program, we tell you about the seventy-fifth anniversary of a tragedy in Texas. It led to new safety requirements for natural gas around the world. Yet the tragedy itself is not very well remembered today. A gas explosion at a school killed nearly three hundred children and adults.
And, later, we hear about a group that provides jobs through the Internet for people in the some of the world's poorest places.
(MUSIC)
FAITH LAPIDUS: People in East Texas call March eighteenth, nineteen thirty-seven, the day a generation died. This week, people in New London and surrounding communities are honoring the victims of that day.
Seventy-five years ago, the community of New London had one of the wealthiest school systems in the country. That was because oil had recently been discovered in the area. People in the community were proud of their newly built school. It cost one million dollars. The building had separate areas for the lower grades and for a high school. London High School -- that was its name -- was for students in grades five through eleven.
School officials had decided to heat the new school with natural gas. At that time oil companies considered it waste gas. It came out of the ground when they drilled for oil.
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