Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Norphlet, AR

Norphlet is a city in Union County in south Arkansas oil country, just north of El Dorado, that rose to prominence with nearby Smackover and El Dorado because of the oil industry.

Norphlet began as a depot on the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway line through El Dorado, completed in January 1891, and its post office was created the same year.

The settlement was called Jesse in the 1880s and was named for Nauphlet Goodwin — but the Postal Department misread the handwritten name as 'Norphlet' when the post office was established in 1891, and the misspelling stuck.

For its first thirty years Norphlet was a timber settlement centered on a sawmill, before oil changed everything.

Oil was discovered at Norphlet in 1922 as drillers tapped the Smackover Oil Field.

On May 14, 1922, the Murphy No. 1 well struck a huge gas pocket escaping at an estimated 65 to 75 million cubic feet per day; on May 16 the gas ignited, shooting flames more than 300 feet into the air and blasting a crater at least 450 feet across and 75 feet deep — one of the most notorious disasters in Arkansas oil-drilling history.

The water-filled Norphlet crater left by the 1922 blowout was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.

Norphlet was incorporated as a town on July 27, 1923, and was elevated to a second-class city in 1925.

'Norphlet' literally became a geological term: the Jurassic sandstone formation in which the oil was found is known worldwide as the Norphlet Formation.

Norphlet's school, established during the boom, was rated one of the best in Arkansas by 1926, and the MacMillan Oil Refinery later stabilized the town's economy until it closed in 1987.