I’m looking for a short story I read years ago (I think in the 60”s) about environmental disasters caused by pollution. Two of the events were a deadly cloud of carbon monoxide blanketing New York caused by massive traffic jam reaching a tipping point, and a methane explosion at a golf course built on a landfill. anyone remember it?
1 Answer
This might, just possibly, be "The End of the Dream" by Philip Wylie. Technically it's a novel, but it's episodic enough, with environmental disasters being described as history by (as opposed to having happened to) the protagonist, that some of the incidents could be remembered as short stories.
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2The disaster in New York is in the chapter titled The Saturday Slaughter though it's caused by nitrogen oxides nor carbon monoxide. The scene on the golf course is when pressurised gases caused by the landfill waste burst out as a geyser, so it's not really an explosion though the end result is the same. The gases aren't specifically described as methane but as CO, CO2, sulphur compounds, methane and nitrogen oxides and various organic compounds of heavy metals. Nov 13, 2018 at 11:56