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This Day in Environmental History – On March 18, 1937 at 3:17 pm, a natural gas leak caused a massive explosion at a school in New London, Texas that killed 298 students and teachers with another 300 suffering serious injury. It is stilled considered the deadliest school accident in US history. The leak went undetected due to natural gas being both invisible and odorless. Following the disaster, governments both in the US and around the world began mandating that a chemical called mercaptan be added to natural gas, which would provide for a strong odor (rotten eggs smell) that could be easily detected by humans. A young reporter named Walter Cronkite covered the event that day on one of his first assignments. In 1996, he was quoted as saying, "I did nothing in my studies nor in my life to prepare me for a story of the magnitude of that New London tragedy, nor has any story since that awful day equaled it.”

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On this Day in Environmental History – On December 3, 1984, a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India accidentally released about 30 tons of methy isocyanide gas into the air of the surrounding residential areas. The accident was caused by a plant malfunction resulting in what was called a runaway chemical reaction. Within 45 minutes, approximately 4,000 people died with another 4,000 dying in the following two weeks, however, the death toll has been widely disputed. Much debate has surrounded the cause of the accident, specifically whether the accident was caused by poor maintenance or sabotage. Long-term health effects have been difficult to quantify due to incomplete records and victim tracking with estimates ranging from 120,000 to 700,000 survivors still struggling with serious medical issues.

This Day in Environmental History – On October 9, 1975 Andrei Sakharov, known as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, became the first Soviet citizen to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end nuclear testing and weapon proliferation. In his essay, titled "Peace, Progress, Human Rights", Sakharov called, “for an end to the arms race, greater respect for the environment, international cooperation, and universal respect for human rights”. The Soviet government denied him permission to go to Norway to receive his award.

This Day in Environmental History – On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall resulting in the death of over 1,800 people and an estimated in $128 billion in property damage. Most of the damage was the result of the failure of the levee system and subsequent flooding in the New Orleans area. The scale of the disaster provoked massive national and international attention with much criticism directed toward local, state and federal government response efforts. Post-storm investigations concluded that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which had constructed the levee flood-control systems, was responsible for their failure. However, federal courts later ruled that the Corps could not be held financially liable due to sovereign immunity guaranteed in the Flood Control Act of 1928. In the aftermath, Hurricane Katrina displaced over one million people from the central Gulf coast to various areas across the nation, becoming the largest diaspora in the history of the United States.

This Day in Environmental History – On July 10, 1976, a runaway chemical reaction resulted in an accidental release to the air of a highly toxic chemical called 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, commonly referred to as dioxin, at a Hoffmann-La Roche chemical plant near the town of Seveso in northern Italy. Over 3,000 small farm animals died immediately, and over 400 people suffered chloracne skin lesions from contact with the contaminated air. Continuous medical monitoring of the Seveso residents after the accident has demonstrated increased occurrences of lymphatic and breast cancer. Since dioxin is a known teratogen (causes birth defects), 26 pregnant women that had been exposed to the dioxin, agreed to undergo an abortion. At that time abortion was a punishable crime in Italy, however, the Italian government granted a special exemption to these Seveso women.

“…conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

To maintain morale during World War I, newspapers in Germany, France, England, and the US censored the early report of the flu’s serious effects. However, newspapers in neutral Spain were free to report the flu's effects specifically the illness of King Alfonso XIII. This created the false impression of Spain as the origin of the flu, thus giving rise to the pandemic's nickname, "Spanish Flu".

This Day in Environmental History – On February 21, 1918 the last remaining Carolina Parakeet died at the Cincinnati Zoo marking its complete extinction. The Carolina Parakeet was the only parrot species native to the Southeastern and Midwest states of the US. Its decline began with European colonization as a function old growth forest habitat destruction. Their final extinction has also been linked to the introduction of the honeybee to the US which overtook many of the bird's nesting sites. Ironically, the honeybee is not native to the US but was rather imported from Europe, where the American Indians often referred to them as “white man’s flies”.

This Day in Environmental History – On January 28, 1986 at 11:39 EST the NASA Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after take-off killing all seven crewmembers. The cause of the disaster was determined to be faulty O rings that became brittle in cold weather resulting in fuel leakage. A forensic investigation of the crash debris was able to determine that several crew members were known to have survived the initial explosion. However, the shuttle had no escape system and the impact of the crew compartment with the ocean surface was too violent for them to survive. Media coverage of the disaster was extensive in which 85 percent of Americans surveyed had heard the news within an hour of the accident and to this day many Americans still know where they were or what they were doing when they first heard of the Challenger explosion.

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This Day in Environmental History – On December 5, 1991 the US EPA issues new rules under the Clean Air Act which introduced a new George Bush lead Republican idea called emissions trading, commonly referred to as “cap and trade”.  These rules were designed to combat the problem of acid rain which had become a serious environmental problem in the 1970s and 80s. The rules coupled emissions standards with the use of the open market to act as a financial incentive to buy and sell extra emissions capacity within industry. Now more than 25 years later, acid rain has been curbed and these rules are considered as one of the great environmental success stories in the United States. Later, in 2010 Congress would reject a similar plan for carbon emissions also called "cap and trade."

This Day in Environmental History – On November 1, 1986, the Sandoz Agro-Chemical Facility in Basel, Switzerland caught fire, releasing over 1,000 tons of chemicals including various pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers into the Rhine River. The release caused a major fish kill and turned the river bright red - with continued damages over 400 kilometers downriver. Historically, it is still considered one of the worst environmental disasters to occur in Europe. The cause of the fire had remained a mystery for more than a decade. However, in 2000 a former senior CIA agent claimed that it was caused by Soviet KGB agents working to distract world attention from the Chernobyl disaster that occurred several months prior

This Day in Environmental History – at 5:29 am on July 16, 1945 the first ever nuclear weapon was detonated in the New Mexico desert by the US Army. This single event was the culmination of the secret Manhattan Project and represented the beginning of the Atomic Age with repercussions that are still felt today. The bomb exploded was a plutonium prototype of the one that would be dropped on Nagasaki, Japan three weeks later which effectively ended World War II. As of September 2017, 2,056 nuclear test explosions have occurred throughout the world since this first test in 1945. More than 50% of them were detonated by the United States, with the remaining detonated by USSR/Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea. https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nucleartesttally

This Day in Environmental History – On June 22, 1969 the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, OH actually “caught fire” due to a long history of industrial pollution which Time Magazine described as a river that ‘oozes rather than flows’ in which ‘a person does not drown but decays’. The fire and the national press that ensued is now widely considered as the spark which triggered massive environmental changes in the US, specifically the Clean Water Act, and the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The environmental laws and policy changes have improved the water quality of the River immensely, areas of the River that were once devoid of fish now support more than 40 species. Several songs have been written about this event including Randy Newman’s “Burn On” and REM’s “Cuyahoga”.

This Day in Environmental History – On January 5, 1976 the Grand Teton Dam in Idaho catastrophically failed resulting in the death of 14 people and over 13,000 cattle. The completed Dam was 310 feet high and stretched 3,000 feet across the Teton River canyon. Approximately one-third of the Dam collapsed, sending a 15 foot wall of water downstream at a rate of over 2 million cubic feet per second. Officials were able to safely evacuate approximately 2,400 people from the towns down river, in a matter of hours; however over 80% of the area’s buildings and homes were destroyed. Prior to the Dam’s construction, a number of engineers had argued that the geology was unstable and several law suits were file to stop the dam construction but were all dismissed. The official cause of the failure was given as, “a combination of geological factors and design decisions that, taken together, permitted the failure to develop”. The Dam cost $100 million to build and the failure resulted in over $2 billion in damages. The Dam was never rebuilt.