A Seminal Moment in Kingsport History

I was in Nashville last week to donate a couple of old newspapers to the Tennessee State Museum. The Museum has many old newspapers in its collection. But it didn't have anything from one of the most momentous occasions in Kingsport history, the day the Eastman exploded. 

The newspaper's coverage is exemplary. It was an all-hands-on--deck approach with the paper even calling in a local wedding photographer to help on the coverage. If you were alive at the time, you remember where you were when the Eastman exploded. 

It was Oct. 4, 1960, when the sky thundered, the ground shook, and all eyes looked toward Long Island, where an enormous black plume of smoke was gathering. Everyone's initial thought was: It's the Big One. The word around town for years had been that Kingsport was on Russia’s target list, because of Holston Ordnance, where unknown tons of bombs and explosive material were stored.

It was the Eastman Explosion, a phrase that endures 60 years later.

Where were you when you heard the Eastman explosion? Was a bonding question among locals for years.

Longtime Eastman employee Pete Lodal, who spent two decades studying the Eastman Explosion, says, "I've never run across anybody who grew up around here who doesn't know the answer to that question."

The Eastman explosion wasn't the Big One, Russia wasn’t bombing Kingsport. But it was Kingsport's Big One, the greatest tragedy in city history.

Yellowed copies of the next day’s Kingsport Times are stored away in many Kingsport homes, the front page headline a grim reminder of that terrible, terrible day: "Blast Toll 13" and underneath were company pictures of the dead.

Two more men died after the newspaper’s deadline. Another lingered for two years before succumbing to injuries from the explosion, bringing the final total to 16.

That issue of the newspaper published a timeline of the explosion, accounts of eyewitnesses, background on the Aniline Plant, where the blast was centered, and previous Eastman accidents.

Everything but why the plant exploded.

No one in town was unaffected. Everyone seemed to know someone who was killed or injured.

All up and down Memorial Boulevard that October afternoon, wives and children were standing in front yards, sitting on front porches, radios turned up, staring down toward Brooks Circle, watching and waiting for loved ones.

Soon a procession of men came walking up the road, their eyes vacant.

"What happened?" they would be asked, and each would shake his head. "I don't know."

An internal Eastman investigation, released in January 1961, listed the cause of the explosion as "not known."

That's where the matter stood for decades. Then in 1995 Lodal, group leader of the Plant Protection Technical Services, began looking into the event. Lodal quotes former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as to why Eastman continues to study the explosion: “The farther back you can look, the farther forward you can see.”

One of the first things he found was the 1960 employee handbook, a 104-page guide to benefits and regulations. On page 52, at the beginning of the safety section, was a picture. Next to the caption "Always Work Safely" was a photo of Building 207. The Aniline Building. That was the building that would explode later that year.

"If you believe in omens, there it was," says Lodal.

Lodal studied photos, pored over architectural drawings, interviewed chemists and engineers and anybody who would talk to him about that day. He wanted to find out what happened.

It was his unsolved mystery, a safety engineer's obsession about a Kingsport disaster that could have been much, much worse. "The explosion happened at 4:43 p.m. If it had happened 15 minutes earlier, there would have been 80 to 100 men in the change house next door."

The change house was leveled by the blast. "Fifteen minutes earlier and it would have been 10 times worse."

In the photos he saw hydrogen storage tanks nearby that were untouched by the explosion. "I shudder to think what would have happened."

As it was, there were 16 lives lost, 45 other people hospitalized at least one night, hundreds treated and released, and a town traumatized.

In dollars, Lodal says it was a $4.5 million capital loss.

"That would be $60 million to $80 million today. Plus it was out of commission six months. So you have hundreds of millions of dollars with property damage and lost business."

Why did it happen? Why did Building 207 explode? Lodal has come up with what he considers a logical answer to that question.

He admits it's speculation. No physical data remains to prove it. But he makes a convincing case.

"The people who designed the Aniline Plant paid close attention to safety. They just didn't know what they had."

What they had was a process that involved a couple of chemicals that began with "nitro," the same nitro that is in nitroglycerine, and a refining process that wasn't as well understood then as it is today.

"It was not one thing," he stresses.

There were new titanium pipes, just brought online. There may have been corrosion in some of the older pipes. And there were those chemical processes.

"They'd been having trouble all day," Lodal says of the Aniline Plant on Oct. 4, 1960.

Several of the gauges indicated the line was running hot.

"About an hour before the explosion they brought in an instrument mechanic." They thought the gauges were wrong. They weren't.

The explosion had the force of six tons of TNT, completely leveling Building 207. The next day there was no need for dump trucks to haul away debris from Building 207. It had all been blown away.

But much of the force went downward, creating two craters, each about 12 feet deep. If it had blown outward, the devastation would have been much worse.

As it was, three employees were killed by the detonation. The other 13 died from flying debris.

Six months later, Eastman formed a Reactive Chemicals Committee to study and promote safety issues. That committee went through several names and branched into numerous subcommittees, but half a century later it still meets monthly, and its purpose remains the same: to make sure that a similar tragedy never happens again.

The list of the dead published by the Kingsport Times the next afternoon was an microcosm of Eastman’s draw to surrounding counties for hires. There were employees from all over the area.

There were two from Indian Springs, another from Blountville, one from Jonesboro, one from Church Hill, one from Fall Branch, one from Telford, one from Hiltons, Virginia, and five with Kingsport addresses.

Usif Haney and Jess Ray Shell, who were listed as missing and presumed dead, were both at ground zero when the blast occurred.

Usif’s son Bruce says his father had been calling his mother all day, reporting on the problems at the new aniline facility. First he told her he wouldn’t be able to come home for lunch. Then in late afternoon he called to say he would have to stay late.

Harold Manis, who wrote a recollection of that day for the Dobyns-Bennett alumni newsletter The D-Ber, in 2005, remembered, “It was about 4:15 P.M. when I asked Usif Haney, who was in charge of the building, if he needed us to stay over after hours. His answer was 'Everything looks good, go on home. If I need you, I will call you.' I can still see him leaning against one of the handrails when he said that.”

Manis was sitting in traffic at the intersection of Center Street and East Sullivan Street, when he looked over at the drug store on the corner. “A lady was walking out of the door, and had only taken a couple of steps, when the large plate glass window blew out just behind her. My car also shook.”

Manis turned his car around and drove to the hill overlooking Eastman at Borden Mills.” It only confirmed what I already knew in my mind. It was the Aniline Plant.”

Kingsport Air!

Kingsport's Homegrown Passenger Airline, Southeast Airlines

Peggy Norris passed away last week. Peggy was the daughter of Mason-Dixon co-founder E. Ward King. I had talked to her a couple of years ago about getting together for an interview about her dad’s airline, Southeast.

But my column went out of business before we could have our chat.

Do you remember Southeast, Kingsport’s own airline. It provided passenger and cargo service exclusively to Tennessee airports. (See map)

But Southeast ran afoul of government regulation, and also to a lot of pressure from other, bigger commercial airlines, and went out of business for good in 1960 after almost four years in service.

Over the years some have speculated that the beginning of the end was when a Southeast plane with ten people aboard crashed into Holston Mountain.

There have also been conspiracy theories about the crash because one of the passengers was former head of research at Eastman, and the inventor of dry ice, Rudolf Hasche.

I think this story from the time of the shutdown tells the actual story.

But I sure wish I had gone ahead with the interview with Peggy to get her thoughts on Kingsport’s airline.

August 4, 1960

Rejection Ends Last Hope For Southeast

By FRANK CREASY

The last thread of hope that Southeast Airlines might resume local service across Tennessee was broken Wednesday.

The Civil Aeronautics Board – in another of its incredible decisions – refused Governor Buford Ellington’s appeal for a review of the case.

On Tuesday governor Ellington requested the CAB grant him, members of Congress, mayors, presidents of Chambers of Commerce and others an audience on behalf of “air transportation for our state.”

The governor's telegram to CAB Chairman Whitney Gilliland was prompted by Southeast’s suspension of operations Sunday night. Southeast was forced to stop its scheduled flights because, according to President E. Ward King, it was losing about $2,000 per day without subsidy. That situation had existed for 31/2 years. During that 3 1/2 years southeast has waged continuous fight for federal certification, But, the CAB awarded the Tennessee routes to Southern Airways of Atlanta.

Southern is now in its ninth week of a pilot’s strike and has not set up a schedule for the routes previously served by Southeast.

The rejection of Gov. Ellington's plea for CAB review was received in Nashville yesterday afternoon. Here is the text of the CAB chairman's telegram of refusal:

“Records show Southeast was denied certification and Southern granted certification after extended hearings including consideration of the position of affected communities, and the decision has been affirmed upon judicial review. The board regrets temporary inability of Southern to provide service, but the situation is not one within the board's control. Under the circumstances we believe the suggested conference would not be appropriate.”

Gov. Ellington had no comment on the rejection, However, last week he said if the CAB failed to re-open the case Tennessee congressmen should seek a Congressional investigation of the action,

Southeast president King declined comment other than to say he was very disappointed.

John Roberts, Southeast’s vice president of operations, said the Kingsport based airline would make no further attempt to resume business.

“We have consulted with our attorneys and there appears no legal recourse,” Roberts said. “There’s nothing left but to close the doors at southeast.”

BONUS POST

If you saw the Oscars last Sunday you may remember the woman with the shaved head who won for Best Documentary (“American Factory” from the Obama’s production company at Netflix). She ended her acceptance speech with “Workers of the world unite!”

Now do you remember?

That woman was Julia Reichert who is suffering from bladder cancer.

It was, as the announcer noted, her fourth nomination and first Oscar.

I remember her first nomination. It was in 1978. I covered it for the Dayton Daily News. I wrote about her several times over the two years I was in Dayton but nothing was more memorable than covering her at the Oscars.

Here are the three stories I wrote about my Hollywood adventure. That was my first, last and only time covering the Oscars.

The Year Without a Summer

It was the Year of Hard Times, the Year Without a Summer. That was the year that ponds in the Kingsport area - it wasn’t called Kingsport yet - iced over in July.

Ir was 1816.

Those who survived that crazy climate change would later refer to it as “Eighteen hundred and froze to death.”

It all began in 1812 when the Tambora island volcano in Indonesia awoke from a 5,000-year slumber and began emitting steam and ash. Then on April 5, 1815 Tambora exploded with such force that its volcanic column soared 15 miles into the sky. The blast was heard 600 miles away. But it was only the beginning.

Five days later Tambora really blew her stack, sending volcanic matter up 25 miles.

The superheated flows of ash, rock and pumice from the mountain wiped out the province’s entire population of ten thousand people. And the resulting 20-foot tsunamis swamped nearby islands. In the end the death toll reached more than 117,000.

The Tambora eruption has been assigned retrospectively a 7 on the 8-point VEI (Volcanic Explosivity Index), the only 7 since Baitoushan on the China-Korea border erupted in 1050 A.D. It was a whopper.

It would be a year before the effects of Tambora would be felt around here but felt they were.

As the late Muriel Spoden details in her book “The Netherland Inn Chronicles,” “All went exceedingly well for (merchant) George Hale until April of 1816 when all of the citizens in the Christianville Boat Yard area experienced the beginning of a very hard time.”

It was a very hard time, particularly in the Northeastern states. Adino Brackett of Lancaster, New Hampshire would later record in his diary 1816, “This past summer and fall (of 1816) have been so cold and miserable that I have from despair kept no account of the weather. It could have been nothing but a repeatation of frost and drought.”

Even Europe was affected. “A wet, ungenial summer” ruined a Swiss holiday for Mary Shelley, John Polidori and their friends but produced a happy outcome for readers. Forced to stay indoors Shelley wrote “Frankenstein” and Polidori penned “The Vampyre.”

The odd weather patterns resulting from sunlight being blocked by all that volcanic ash was felt as far south as northeast Tennessee. Locals noted an unusual red glow in sunsets.

Spoden writes, “Starting in April, (1816) severe cold weather, with snow, ice and frost became progressively worse through August…. People froze to death as snow and sleet fell for seventeen days in May. August was worse as ice coating killed everything green and ice covered ponds and rivers.”

There was even a frost on August 22. Spoden says, “Crops were ruined. Seed corn stored in 1815 sold in the spring of 1817 for $5 to $10 a bushel. To add to the farming and boating woes, the spring flood curtailed business throughout the area. These and other problems caused George Hale to lose the King Saltworks contracts, and many charge customers were unable to pay their bills.”

It was a very hard time indeed in east Tennessee

But the long-term effects of the Year without a Summer were even more profound for the country. Dave Thurlow of the Weather Notebook radio show says the impact is still being felt today, particularly the effect of one June cold snap that killed the vegetable crop across the Northeast and inspired many bankrupt farmers to pack up and move to the more temperate Midwest. “Had there been no reason for European settlers to head west at that time, the nation's distribution of farmland and manufacturing, and its balance of power, might have turned out much differently. You could say that our lives today are, in some ways, the product of a 5-day cold snap (204) years ago.”