Approved. Flash Test 105°
...........................
State Inspector of Nebraska.
By ........................
Deputy.
But there was no inspector present, and the barrels were all branded beforehand and while empty, in defiance of the law and public safety. The reporter stayed until the cars were loaded, the doors closed, and saw the trains pull out. It is from this warehouse that the greater part of the barrelled oil consumed in Nebraska is forwarded. At the warehouse of the same company in Nebraska City the reporter found the same thing going on, and there, too, he found the official stencil-plates of several of the State oil inspectors lying at hand on the tanks, waiting to be used at the pleasure of the employés of the company to brand the desired government guarantee on any oil, regardless of what it was. The Illinois State Journal found the same practice permitted in Springfield by the oil inspector in February, 1894. The Bee reporter describes how tanks, once branded, came and went, were filled and emptied and filled again for months, with no inspection of the oil in them. Often the tanks were not even branded.
The Omaha Daily Bee of November 24, 1891, gives a careful analysis of the recently amended inspection law of Nebraska. It shows that in many important points the law has been changed so as to put the safety of the people in the power of the combination which supplies almost all the oil used in the State. The standard required has been lowered. The liability to a charge of manslaughter for death resulting from bad oil has been changed to a liability for damages. The method of making the tests has been changed for the worse. No provision has been made for the protection of travellers by the inspection of oil used by the railroads, although accidents and serious ones, from the use of dangerous oil were frequent in the trains and at stations.[603] The Bee said editorially of the oil combination that it had "managed, by its shrewdness in enacting this law, to make Nebraska the refuse tank for its rejected Eastern oil, and at the same time to crowd out of the State about all opposition." By means of this lowering of the test, oil that was too poor to pass in Iowa could be sent on to Nebraska and sold there. The Bee gives instances where this was done.
The Bee continued its investigations in 1893. It declared, December 5, 1893, that the inspection law, imperfect at best, was "being still further annulled by the open defiance of the leading oil companies." It declared "the leading violator" to be one of the principal companies in the oil combination. In a later issue the Bee printed the result of tests made for it of oils purchased in the principal towns of the State. In almost every such case these showed that oils which were below the test were being sold to the people as good under the guarantee of the State. Some of them were "as safe for household use as dynamite," the Bee stated. It said editorially, December 15, 1893, that it had in its possession a letter from the secretary of the Iowa State Board of Health affirming that oil condemned by the State of Iowa is shipped to Nebraska. The oil inspector of the State made a vigorous denial, but the Bee refused to withdraw its statements. Its tests, it said, had been made by competent chemists. A suit is now pending in San Francisco, brought by the New Zealand Fire Insurance Company against the oil combination. It is charged that it sold low-test oil, that its inflammability caused fire and destruction of a dwelling insured by the insurance company, which was compelled to pay the loss. Some power, certainly not originating among the people, has for years, in States where the inspection laws required a high quality of oil, been at work procuring a reduction of the test. In some cases this has been accomplished only after persistent lobbying for years, as in Michigan. The test in Michigan has been lowered by legislation, as in Nebraska, and with similar results. The reports of the Michigan State Board of Health show that as the standard was lowered, fires and deaths from explosions increased. The Detroit Tribune of December 27, 1891, says that the reduction of the test in Michigan and Nebraska is due to the avarice of the producers (refiners) and nothing less than criminal carelessness of the legislators. The dangerous constituents of petroleum, such as naphtha and gasolene, are indistinguishable by the eye of the buyer from kerosene. They can be as easily mixed with it as hot and warm water with cold. These reductions of the test in various States permit mixtures more hazardous than dynamite to be sold to the people, lulled into reliance upon the State inspectors. "The advantage to the oil company," says the Detroit (Michigan) Times of April 30, 1891, "is obvious. Naphtha and gasolene are worth, perhaps, three cents a gallon. Kerosene is worth three times as much. A test which allows one quart of kerosene and three quarts of gasolene to constitute a gallon of merchantable illuminating oil will enable a few more colleges to be endowed, though increasing the death-roll in a notable degree."
One of the demands of those who are conducting the agitation, noticed elsewhere, for the admission of American oils free into Canada is that the standard of Canadian oil inspection be lowered. This, says the Hamilton (Ontario) Spectator, will open the Canadian market to the low-test and dangerous oils made by the American combination, and "restore the old order of lamp explosions, with the consequent loss of life and property."
An unwritten chapter of this story is the experience of the Ohio oil producers, and the use of the inferior oil of the Ohio field to adulterate oils made from Pennsylvania petroleums.
Lord Coke's dictum about the decrease of quality never had a more spectacular illustration than was given at Oil City and Titusville on Sunday, June 5, 1892. Oil Creek was high with rains. A dam burst and made the creek a flood. Its waters ate away the insufficient foundations of tanks, and rivers of naphtha and gasolene and kerosene overran the river of water for miles. A spark did the rest. Oil refineries took fire, tanks exploded. There were two raging seas—water beneath, fire above. Men, women, children, animals, property were swept along in their intermingled waves. From every overturned tank and blazing refinery fresh streams of oil flowed into the sea of flame, which climbed the hills for the victims the other sea could not reach. Those who escaped drowning breathed in a more dreadful death. It was a volcano and deluge in one. It was one of the most terrible catastrophes of our times. Even the scare-heads of the newspapers could not exaggerate its horrors. The governor of the State made a public appeal for help. The coroner's jury held an inquest at Oil City upon fifty-five bodies at one sitting. It declared the cause of the calamity to have been the gross carelessness of the owners and custodians of a tank of naphtha, in permitting it, while filled with 15,000 barrels of naphtha, to stand without proper protection from fire and water. The tank was shown, by the testimony, to have stood on sand within a few feet of the creek and without safeguard. It was shown that complaints had been made to the managers of the refinery, which was one of the subsidiary companies of the oil trust, about this tank and others before the disaster, but without avail. The coroner's jury laid the blame where it belonged—upon the company whose tank gave way. Its verdict said: "The naphtha which caused this awful destruction of life and property ... was stored in a tank located on the bank of Oil Creek, on the Cornplanter Farm, near McClintockville, where it was built about four years previous to this time. At the time of its construction the tank was from twenty to thirty feet from ordinary high-water mark in the creek, but this distance has been gradually reduced by the action of the water prior to this flood to between six and ten feet, and this flood further washed away the ground up to and under the tank, a distance of from fifteen to twenty feet. A part of the tank bottom, thus being left without support, tore out, allowing the naphtha to escape into the creek. The evidence of the watchman, James Marsh, shows that he realized danger from the undermining of the tank, for he made a feeble effort previous to this flood to protect it by throwing loose stones between the tank and the creek. The jury find from the evidence that all persons owning and having in custody this tank and its contents were guilty of gross carelessness in permitting it, while filled with naphtha, to stand without proper protection from fire and water."
The company which owned this tank belonged to the oil combination. It was, strange to say, one of the tanks of the Keystone refinery, to which Matthews, the Buffalo independent, had turned for a supply of crude oil when all other sources failed,[604] and which had been thereupon bankrupted and taken into the combination seven years before. Here was one fruit of that victory over competition. The coroner's jury at Titusville reprobated in the strongest terms the folly of storing oil in tanks within reach of high-water. It called upon "citizens and officials, ... for the common good of all," to do what it said was "entirely practicable: to so locate and guard and construct oil-tanks and other receptacles of inflammable petroleum products that they cannot be floated away, or the contents floated out of them by water," and that "in case of flood and fire lives and private property cannot be endangered by them." Although here and all over the oil regions the business was under the control of one combination, and had been so since early in the seventies, the Titusville jury, less courageous than that of Oil City, declared that it could "attach no blame to any one in particular for the present loss of life," because this "custom of storing and manufacturing oil and its products, regardless of endangering the lives and property of others, had been allowed to grow up here as well as all over the oil regions." These verdicts have been followed by suits now pending in the Pennsylvania courts, claiming heavy damages from the oil combination as responsible for the disaster and the loss of life and property.
The Oil City and Titusville disaster is but a provincial affair compared with the metropolitan avalanche of ruin which is all ready to move upon the cities on New York Bay from the refineries and tanks along its shores. Several condensed oceans of unignited fire are waiting for such accident as happens almost every day to some gas-works or refinery or tank-car. On creeks running into the East River, on bays opening from the New Jersey shore into the greater bay, in tanks whose contents would overlay the whole sheet of water from the Narrows to Hell Gate and Spuyten Duyvil, these volcanoes are dozing, and they are light sleepers.