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.”