“Look! Sister Mary Lydia, look. There’s a fireball out there.”

October 19, 2014 10:54 AM

"Only the pen of a Dante could do justice to the sights and sounds that occurred in the St. Clair-Norwood neighborhood that hellish afternoon." Tomorrow marks the 70th anniversary of the East Ohio Gas Explosion, “when fire rained down and streets literally collapsed." Three above ground tanks holding liquified natural gas leaked, caught fire, and exploded, leveling one square mile in Cleveland and killing 130 people. It also served the backdrop to local author Don Robertson's beloved novel The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, which follows the adventures of a nine-year-old boy on that day.
posted by How the runs scored (6 comments total)

My father was there for that. In fact one of his earliest clear memories is hauling ass down the street with his parents carrying the younger kids as a wall of fire swept casually down the street a few blocks behind.

We have pictures from the aftermath, the most striking of which is the burnt out family car sitting peacefully on metal wheels (the rubber had completely burned off) in front of the remains of his childhood home.

Interesting side note about traumatic experiences: For years my father had periodic dreams that included 130 corpses lined up on their backs watching the sky. Close to the 60th anniversary something new happened: As he watched them lay there he could hear the noise that the fire made. Upon waking he realized that in sixty years, through countless family discussions and retellings -- even after delving into the experience in some depth in therapy -- he had never once remembered the sound. All of his memories had been silent.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:45 AM on October 19, 2014 [10 favorites]

One year after the Explosion, Mayor Frank Lausche's investigative board would sum up their findings like so: "Some deficiency or failure due to causes unknown in design, construction or operation of the unique process."

I retain some of the Slovenian culture of my ancestors, and as such I'm compelled to say that this is so much bullshit. The so called "Kingdom" of Yugoslavia was busy ignoring WWII so the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes could continue their traditional recreation of killing each other. In light of that fact it is idiocy to claim that a goddamn huge explosion that leveled a Slovene ghetto was an accident. It is of course in poor tasted to speculate, but tradition holds the people responsible were of an ethnicity that rhymes with "Herbian".

This has been your Balkan daily conspiracy report. Tune in tomorrow when we explain how it was really the Soviets in a long term plan to put propel their patsy Tito into power.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 12:07 PM on October 19, 2014 [3 favorites]

Morris Bird III! Robertson's book is one of the first "grown-up books" I ever read, because it had a little boy on the cover pulling a red wagon. Wow -- there is a "tank farm" not so far from where I live now, and I think of this event, often. Wow.

I still have the old paperback of The Greatest Thing: I've not read it in years -- maybe decades, but it sticks with one, especially the great last line:

"Onward, ever onward," said Morris Bird III. Sandra giggled.
posted by allthinky at 12:56 PM on October 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

That's a pretty trashy allegation to make. What other disasters would you like to blame on entire ethnicities with zero evidence?
posted by kiltedtaco at 1:41 PM on October 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

What other disasters would you like to blame on entire ethnicities with zero evidence?

Several thousand years of Balkan history. Choose your massacre, choose your ethnicity. It doesn't really matter.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:18 PM on October 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Several thousand years? Whose history book are you reading? Slobodan Milošević's?
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 2:30 PM on October 19, 2014