Historic Disasters of East Tennessee

By Dewaine A. Speaks

For more than 150 years, East Tennesseans have experienced disasters of historic proportions. The 1902 Fraterville Mine explosion took the lives of 216 men and boys. A 1904 head-on passenger train wreck in New Market claimed the lives of 64. In 1906, Jellico was practically destroyed by the explosion of a train car loaded with dynamite. Floodwaters near Rockwood in 1929 took the lives of 7 Boy Scouts and their Scoutmaster. An explosion in 1960 at Kingsport's Eastman plant killed 16 workers and injured 400. In 2016, a fire in the Great Smoky Mountains claimed the lives of 14 while destroying 2,460 buildings. Knoxville author Dewaine Speaks chronicles these and other historic tragedies in East Tennessee.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Aug 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781439667620

Dewaine A. Speaks

Dewaine Speaks worked for thirty-five years for Fulton Bellows, ending his career there as a national sales manager. He made sales calls and attended meetings with engineers in most states and several foreign countries. Some of the projects that the company worked on while he was with the firm are described in the book. During the many meetings with engineers who had applications or problems to be solved, Speaks never failed to notice the respect that Fulton and his products received. He often wondered why Fulton's story had never been told. So, he set out to do just that. Dewaine has authored three other books with The History Press.

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INTRODUCTION

The objective of this work is to combine in a single book several historical stories that are bound by a common denominator: disaster. The written material produced by varied contemporary authors has been examined and evaluated as to its accuracy and believability. The stories are, in most cases, corroborated by other writers who researched and wrote about the individual stories at the time the events occurred.

Many of the eyewitnesses in these accounts are no longer alive. Writers at the time of the incidents sought out and conducted extensive interviews that are housed in today’s libraries and archives. The events were often so catastrophic that they affected entire communities and families so much that in some areas an oral history has been maintained and passed down generation to generation. Modern-day interviews with some of the victims’ descendants vary little from the interviews recorded with actual eyewitnesses at the time the disasters occurred.

At least one of the following elements is present in each of the following disparate sixteen chapters: greed, recklessness, poor judgment, pilot error or bad luck. Except for the cases where bad luck was present, with reasonable care nearly all of the incidents could have been avoided. Lessons were learned but only after the bitter reality of catastrophic disasters had occurred.

Chapter 1

INTERSTATE DEATHS IN HEAVY FOG

The Hiwassee River has its beginnings in North Georgia’s Towns County. From there, it flows generally northward into North Carolina and then flows westward into Tennessee. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has built four dams on the river in North Carolina. Some of the water below one of the dams, the Appalachia Dam, is diverted through an eight-mile tunnel and is then cascaded down through the Appalachia powerhouse, thereby generating electricity.

After leaving the mountains, the medium-sized river flows across fairly flat Tennessee land until it reaches the Tennessee River north of Chattanooga. At that point, the water has traveled about 147 miles since it became a river. Along this last leg of its journey, the peaceful river flows under the Interstate 75 bridge about 45 miles northeast of Chattanooga.

Old-timers who live in the area say that on occasion, a deep, impenetrable fog is produced by the river when weather conditions are right to produce a perfect storm. During the morning of December 11, 1990, conditions for a dense fog were perfect, and conditions for the fast-moving motorists traveling south on I-75 could not have been worse.

As drivers approached the interstate bridge that crosses the Hiwassee River, it was thought that they encountered the dense fog and quickly slowed to about ten miles per hour. Soon, cars traveling seventy-five miles per hour or more began to hit the slow-moving cars. Because the day was clear, drivers were in the fog bank before they knew what was happening. At about 9:00 a.m., cars and trucks started plowing into one another. Fire was soon sweeping through the scene that was described as surreal. The New York Times reported, People involved in the accident, which extended over more than a mile of the highway, told of hearing the crashing of metal and shattering of glass in the fog as dozens of tractor-trailers collided with each other and with cars. There were several explosions and fires.

The first call came into the Bradley County Sheriff ’s Department dispatcher at 9:14 a.m. Three minutes later, Bradley County deputy Bill Dyer reached the scene. Even though Dyer could not see all of the destruction that surrounded him, he knew by the awful sounds he was hearing that he was in the midst of a disaster. He immediately asked for all available emergency resources to be sent to the site.

Mike Dooley, a dispatcher with the Bradley County Sheriff ’s Department, said Dyer kept calling for help. Dyer told him, Shut down the interstate, I can still hear them hitting each other.

Ralph Fisher, from nearby Cleveland, Tennessee, was traveling in the northbound lane when he hit the fog bank. He saw the traffic slowing down, and because he was familiar with the danger the dense fog often caused in the area, he quickly pulled to the side of the highway. He said, After that I started hearing bangs and booms from everywhere. Immediately after that there was a truck on fire from across the road. We started hearing them banging and booming from over there. Then all of a sudden you started hearing them from everywhere. It was at this point that several trailer trucks started burning.

Father Bob Brodie, former priest at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Athens, Tennessee, was attending a meeting with other area ministers when he received news of the chain-reaction accident nearby on I-75. Reverend Brodie was a chaplain for the Tennessee Highway Patrol and went directly to the scene. The other ministers split up and went to area hospitals that were receiving accident victims. Brodie, who had been in law enforcement prior to entering the ministry, was accustomed to seeing accident scenes, but he said that he had never witnessed anything like he saw that day.

Brodie administered last rites to nine victims who were lying in the highway median and two others who were still trapped in their cars, and he attempted to comfort the distraught family members of those who had perished. He told of a young boy who was trying to find his mother. Brodie told the young boy that he should go in an ambulance to Chattanooga to be with his father, who had survived.

Next, Brodie went to each hospital to visit with survivors. He noted that many of the truck drivers whose rigs had struck other vehicles were emotionally distraught. Somehow, they were blaming themselves for many of the deaths. Brodie made a mental note that the truck drivers were going to need a lot of counseling. He said, These sorts of accidents are part of the human race. You’d go crazy trying to figure out why they happen. Even worse is calling it God’s plan. This day, with everything those involved had gone through, he thought for the time being it was best to let this go unsaid.

One of the burning trucks was hauling dicumyl peroxide. Almost everyone involved in the crashes began to have severe breathing problems. As soon as the rescuers arrived on the scene, they encountered the same problems. As the first responders went from truck to truck trying to determine what hazardous material each truck might be carrying, this task was made more difficult because several of the trucks were mangled and burned to their frames.

A fireman from Athens, Tennessee, said he was fighting a fire in which he thought one car and one trailer-truck were involved. After he was able to knock the flames down, he determined that it was actually three cars and one truck.

More than two hundred rescuers came from Knoxville, Chattanooga and other smaller towns. Paramedics went about tending to the injured while firefighters attempted to extinguish the many fires. A makeshift morgue was set up in the interstate median. The bodies were later transported to a hospital in Athens.

As the hours went on, fifty-one injured people were taken to Bradley Memorial Hospital in Cleveland by three helicopters from Chattanooga and Knoxville. Local ambulances transported those who were less injured. Several of these had to be extricated from their smashed vehicles.

Interestingly, the hospitals in Athens and Cleveland had practiced for a major disaster only the week before. Doctors, nurses and technicians immediately rushed to the hospitals and were at each location when the first victims arrived. The nursing director at the Athens hospital, Brenda Waltz, said, We initially heard it was twenty cars, then fifty cars, and then one hundred cars. It was hectic but very organized.

The director of Bradley County Emergency Management Agency, Hal Munck, said that the fog was so thick the drivers could see nothing. He was in the middle of the wreck scene shortly after it happened and said that somebody told him it was like somebody throwing a blanket across your windshield. Munck saw a small car that was sandwiched between two trailer-trucks. He said, It was about the width of an ordinary door.

It was thought that the first collisions were in the southbound lanes, but shortly thereafter, cars traveling in the northbound lanes were slamming into one another as well. Apparently, the northbound drivers spotted the mêlée that was occurring in the southbound lanes and slowed abruptly. Cars and trucks then started plowing into the slower-moving vehicles, repeating the chain of events that was happening on the other side of the highway. To make matters worse, the authorities reported that wrecks were occurring as far away as six miles from the site where dozens of cars were piling on top of one another.

Cecil Whaley, director of the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency, would say later, This is one of the worst accidents that anyone can remember happening in Tennessee in terms of vehicles and fatalities involved. He indicated that the initial reports he received in his Nashville office indicated that at least fifteen people had been killed and more than fifty injured. However, the final number of fatalities was twelve and the number of injured was forty-two. Ninety-nine cars and trucks were destroyed. Even with this revision, at that time it was the worst traffic accident in Tennessee history and the fifth worst in the history of the country.

Russell Newman, eastern regional director of the Tennessee Emergency Medical Agency, said, It was just one of those chain-reaction collisions that happen in this kind of situation—very heavy fog and probably too much speed. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in Washington, D.C., immediately sent investigators to the scene.

Frank Kornegay, a meteorologist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said he was not surprised that such an accident had occurred. He said, Warmer water, cool air, light wind—you’re going to have fog form.

Because of the enormity of the accident, Kornegay offered a short course on the geographical location of the accident and the formation of fog:

The Hiwassee Bridge area is historically in a fog because it lies near several bodies of water—the Hiwassee and several ponds at the nearby Bowaters Southern Paper Company. Because the area lies between two ridges, the area receives little wind when compared to other places. For several days, East Tennessee had been under a high-pressure system, which also tended to keep winds at a minimum.

Water in area lakes has been warmer this year than any time in recent memory. With cool mornings and diminished hours of daylight, the fog takes longer to burn off.

In the fall, cool air circulates over warm water and becomes saturated with moisture. When the air moves away from the water surface and begins to cool again, it can no longer hold onto the moisture, which condenses into small droplets, forming fog.

I-75 within the fog zone. Private collection.

Part of the fog-warning system. Private collection.

Realizing that the area was prone to the production of dense fog, the State of Tennessee in 1980 had installed signs that were supposed to flash Extreme Dense Fog Area when heavy fog was present. Some witnesses reported that the signs were not working properly on the day of the crash.

From the first day, survivors thought the dense fog had not formed by natural causes alone. They had the backing of some scientists who thought the fog had formed too thickly and too quickly. Just ten minutes before the crashes started, drivers