Last week workmen in an alcohol plant at Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey’s refinery at Linden, N. J., smelled escaping naphtha gas. Before they could telephone a report to the office, something exploded. The air around the building flared and roared. Long blue flames waved out the windows. Men on the ground were knocked flat. Others were blown from roofs and scaffoldings 200 feet away. Flaming men with clothes and flesh in tatters blindly staggered out of the building, ran screaming off into a fence surrounding the reservation, collapsed in the snow. In a few minutes the fire was out. Casualties: eleven killed; 54 hospitalized. Probable cause: naphtha gas, leaking from a pipe near the alcohol building, had been ignited by a riveter’s forge, a plumber’s torch, or a gasoline motor—all within 100 yards of the fiery explosion.
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