Over the last seventy years, the world has experienced a crowded history of terrible, fatal events, and methane gas has regrettably added to these at all too regular intervals.  Each incident described below may have been prevented by methane gas detection.  Though at the time of each of these events, methane gas detector technology was not nearly as sophisticated, effective or as convenient as what is available today.

New London School

18 March, 1937 was an ordinary day at the New London School in Texas. Some of the students were grumbling that they were suffering from headaches but otherwise everything was as it should be.

After lunch, there was a class in carpentry. The teacher introduced the afternoon’s topic to the gathered students and then pressed the switch of an electric sander.

When the sander came on, the motor sparked. This spark ignited such a powerful natural gas explosion that the roof of the school was blasted up from the supporting walls. The roof then crashed downward and destroyed the building. Of the 600 students and 40 teachers in the school, just 130 avoided injury. Over 300 were killed.

Just a few months before, the school board had canceled the natural gas contract. Instead, as was common practice in the area, the board decided to save money by arranging for plumbers to siphon off gas from the local gasoline company’s residue pipeline.

Disastrously, the gas from this line leaked into the confined crawlspace that ran under the school. From there, it worked its way into the classrooms. This why the students had suffered headaches - the gas was steadily driving the air from the building. Nobody took the complaints of the students seriously, though, and certainly no-one considered the possibility of a gas leak causing headaches.

Cleveland, Ohio

On Friday, 20 October, 1944, a series of explosions and fires tore through an area of one square mile in Cleveland, Ohio. The first detonation occurred at around 2:30 in the afternoon. A vapor started to seep from the side of an above ground storage tank belonging to the East Ohio Gas Company. A wind blowing in from Lake Erie then blew this vapor into the street gutters where the vents for the sewerage system were located.

Having blended with air, the natural gas vapor now merged with the gas in the sewers and exploded. Flames burst upward, roaring out of ventilation shafts and tearing covers from manholes.

The sudden and frightening violence of the explosion terrified local residents, but they believed that the worst was over and did not evacuate their homes. Just a few minutes later, however, a natural gas storage tank adjacent to the one that had leaked burst into flames and razed the entire tank storage facility. This was followed by a succession of explosions and fires that drove flames through the drainage system and right into people’s homes. 130 people died, and many buildings were either blown to pieces or burned down.

Ronan Point

On 11 March 1968, builders put the finishing touches to a new prefabricated tower block called Ronan Point in West Ham, an area of London. Residents began to settle into the apartments, and one of these new occupiers was a lady called Ivy Hodge who had moved into a corner flat on the 18th floor. Early on the morning of 16 May 1968, just two months after Ronan Point opened, Ivy struck a match to light her cooker. The flame of the match ignited a leak of natural gas, causing an explosion that ripped out a corner of the building. Ivy miraculously survived but four others were killed and seventeen injured.

Abbeystead

In 1984, at Abbeystead in the United Kingdom, there was local concern about a scheme to pump water over a dam to adjust the flow of the river Wyre. On 23 May, 44 people gathered in the valve house of the dam to hear the water authority discuss the purpose of the scheme and to witness a demonstration of the pumping process.

Unknown to anyone, during the 17 days prior to the meeting, methane gas had gathered in a tunnel through which the water to the valve house was set to flow. When the pumping began and the water ran out of the tunnel, the methane came with it and mixed with the air. This created a highly flammable atmosphere in a building where the visitors were free to smoke. The gas immediately exploded, killing 16 people and injuring the remainder.

Piper Alpha

The Piper Alpha disaster of 6 July 1988 was the world’s worst offshore tragedy. Of the 229 workers on this North Sea oilfield production platform, just 62 survived.

The causes of this appalling loss of life were two explosions, the first of which occurred when a natural gas condensate leaked under the Piper Alpha platform and caught fire. A second enormous explosion followed when the flames from the first melted part of a gas pipeline.

Astonishingly, the fire continued to be fed for two hours by gas pumped through a pipeline from an adjacent oil platform, the Tartan. The gas stopped only when this line broke apart.

Hutchinson

Hutchinson is a city in Reno County, Kansas, and the site in January 2001 of a massive and deadly migration of compressed natural gas.

The source of the gas was the Yaggy storage field. From here, the gas squeezed through underground fissures and erupted on the surface in 15 separate blowholes. The explosions continued over two days, killing two people at a mobile home park, demolishing two businesses, and damaging a further two dozen or so shops and offices. Hutchinson authorities ordered a partial evacuation, and experts were called in to identify any other gas leaks across the city.

All of these events have now passed into history, but they remain in our minds as a reminder of the destructive power of methane gas.