The Tanks Go Up

In 1940 the East Ohio Gas Co. began constructing three big spherical tanks, and a smaller cylindrical one, at their sprawling plant in Cleveland's east side. Each was a giant thermos bottle, cunningly built to contain a strange substance--natural gas reduced to liquid under intense cold. One tank leaked slightly, but it was repaired. After that the tanks performed a miracle of storage. The liquid they held, when vaporized would become 240,000,000 cubic feet of inflammable gas. One afternoon last week, a white, cloudlike stream squirted from one of them. A thick fog drifted up. Then the whole sky ignited, and men working in the open company yard crisped and died like moths.

Thousands of people in homes and in the streets felt the instant blast of furnace heat, blinked at the puzzling light. In a house a block from the tanks Mrs. Charles Flickinger plugged in her vacuum cleaner, and started back. At the same instant the walls glared red and the curtains caught fire. A surveyor stared at the towering flames, automatically sighted past a factory roof and a chimney and found the fire reached to 11 1/2DEG above the horizon. He pulled out a slide rule and calculated its height--2,800 feet. Within minutes crowds of men, women & children were leaving their homes to hurry wildly along the sidewalks, clutching bundles of belongings. The wail of fire sirens rose all over the city and sound trucks blared directions to refugees.

Then the explosions began. Vast sheets of fire were flung for blocks, as though the tanks had become giant flamethrowers The moments after blasts were musical with the sound of tinkling glass. Block after block of houses smoked, caught fire, and burned wildly, the flames slanting in a searing wind. The sound of explosions spread as gas mains began to detonate. Manhole covers went spinning into the air like tiddlywinks and sections of paving disintegrated as though from dynamite blasts. Birds tumbled dead out of the air. As night fell, the flames lighted scenes of surrealistic desolation. The hospitals were full of burned men and women, and as firemen moved into the edges of the great fire behind white curtains of water they began to meet the blackened, unrecognizable dead.

At week's end the fires had died--all except the blue fountains of flame which still rose above broken gas mains. One hundred and twelve people were dead, 104 were missing, hundreds were homeless. Production in 39 Cleveland war plants was halted. Bulldozers clanked in the ruins, pushing over chimneys and walls, sloshing in lakes of black water left by the fire hoses. East Cleveland around the ruined gas storage plant looked as though it had been bombed.

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