Waverly, Tennessee, is not too far from our adopted home, Clifton. It’s the county seat of Humphreys County, west of Nashville. Located in the Trace Creek Valley, east of the creek’s confluence with the Kentucky Lake impoundment of the mighty Tennessee River, Waverly is small. The 2020 U.S. Census reported less than 5,000 residents for the whole of Humphreys County.
You may recall that Waverly was catastrophically flooded in a freak event by Mother Nature in August of 2021. Trace Creek became a monster with heavy rainfall in a very short time, over 17 inches. Overflowing the banks in the middle of the little town, it flooded many of the buildings with up to four feet of water. Worse, houses were washed off their foundations, and the resulting wall of debris battered and rammed itself downstream. Sadly, 20 people lost their lives.
That’s not the first time a disaster of national note has tried to wipe Waverly off the map.
Waverly began as a stop along the stagecoach road between Nashville and Memphis in the early 19th century. Like most of Middle and West Tennessee, Waverly was pro-Confederacy during the Civil War. The railroad that ran through the heart of the town became an important strategical site for both armies. Union forces occupied Waverly in 1863, guarding the railroad between White Bluff and Old Johnsonville. The Union troops managed to build a fort at the courthouse square, despite being constantly harassed by Confederate guerillas. In November 1864, Nathan Bedford Forrest’s men attacked and destroyed the Federal depot in what became known as the Battle of Johnsonville.
Waverly and the railroad survived the Civil War and, over time, became your average small town in America. Sons went away to war, and some never returned. Many of Waverly’s high school graduates left, seeking a better life and their fortunes in big cities like Nashville and Memphis. Some never left, unable to break free of the siren’s song of home. Big-city problems like crime were mostly a faraway thing. You could always find a parking place or a post to tie up your mule. As so many of us learned, those little towns where nothing ever happened were exactly what we wanted as we grew older. Not a lot of noise or drama.
All of that peace and quiet rolled on through the forties into the seventies. Some businesses were survivors of the earlier days of the century. Others came and went. The world changed. The railroad stayed its course, causing minor inconvenience to the drivers who were forced to sit for a few minutes while the train cars rolled on and on and on. A caboose usually evoked a “thank goodness” or a smile of relief.
On February 22, 1978, a Wednesday, the senior captain of the Volunteer Fire Department in Waverly received a phone call after most of the inhabitants of the hamlet were fast asleep. The town’s police chief was calling to inform him that there had been a wreck at the main crossing.
The westbound Louisville & Nashville derailed with 23 train cars, all of them piling up on top of each other. A mountain of twisted steel and fractured wheels looked more like a huge junkyard. Among the wreckage were two white tankers connected to each other, jackknifed in a V position, lying beside that mountain. They were banged up but did not appear to be leaking. The entire thing was a giant annoyance to the town residents, who would have to detour. It was cold and late at night.
The train’s conductor walked out of the crushed and twisted train cars with the good news that no motor vehicles, passengers, or other personnel were involved or injured. The bad news was that he had lost communication with L&N. During that long night, people of the town and the surrounding area had either heard the tremendous screeching and unholy crashing and banging or gotten word and were naturally curious. Indeed, the wreckage was awesome, and not in a good way. What a mess! And how long to clean up?
Police and fire personnel were faced with growing crowds, up close and personal with the monstrosity. They managed to commandeer multiple barricades with flashing lights and set up a 1200-foot perimeter. They evacuated an adult group home, only yards from the tracks and the site of the derailment.
Finally, some L&N hardhats showed up just before dawn on Thursday, February 23. They found no fire, no leaks, and no injuries, just a lot of hard work that needed to be done quickly. Not just for the townspeople, but the rail needed to be in working order as soon as possible.
One of the two derailed tankers was labeled “Anhydrous Ammonia Only.” There did not appear to be any leakage, but they were still spooky … silently threatening, law enforcement people thought. The wreck had inverted one end of the tanker that lay in the street right across the intersection. The water hoses of Waverly’s fire trucks were trained on the tankers. Who knew when one of them would begin to leak or, worse yet, explode?
During the day on Thursday, huge boom cranes were positioned around the wreckage, one from L&N and one from Steel City, along with a salvage crew and a couple of bulldozers. It was going to be a hard job.
A city fireman overheard someone, not a local, say that the two tankers contained liquid propane. Not anhydrous ammonia. Liquefied petroleum gas, LPN. Civil Defense people with sniffer dogs wove in and out of the wrecking, trying to detect any leaks. The local authorities had been told that all tests on the tankers had shown no leaks and, therefore, presented no immediate danger.
By Friday morning, the gas company had shut off lines surrounding the wreckage, and the power was cut. The cleanup began in an orderly fashion.
All was going smoothly until one of the cranes picked up an open rail car lying on the other side of the tankers. A witness watched in horror as a stray set of wheels caught up in the mangled car being lifted dropped like a giant 4,000-pound barbell onto one of the tankers. A rail crew member assured a bystander that the walls of the tankers were made from steel three-quarters of an inch thick, and it appeared to be all right. An interior voice, instinct, murmured to an onlooker that he probably needed to move away a little further. By noon, most of the cars were back on the rails, and the tracks were effectively cleared. Another train, moving at four or five miles an hour, eased through town and passed the two tankers lying beside the tracks.
By mid-afternoon, the sun made its reappearance, and warmer air crept into Waverly. The cold wave had passed on through. Different experts debated how to unload the tankers safely. The decision was made to unload the propane from the tanks, fill the tanks with water, and place them back on the tracks. L&N moved in a fuel truck from Jackson, Tennessee, for the off-loading of the propane.
If you don’t have a healthy fear of propane, you will. It is a refined, liquefied petroleum gas, and when it hits the air, its low boiling point makes it vaporize as soon as it escapes from any pressurized container. They call it “flammable steam” because just one gallon of LP can vaporize instantly to become more than 250 gallons of flammable gas. It’s denser than air, so propane leaking from a container will sink to the lowest spots around. Waiting for a spark, just one is all it takes.
At five minutes til 3 in the afternoon, the world, according to Waverly, blew up. A spark ignited the invisible, colorless, odorless propane that had spread throughout the town, and Waverly became an instant inferno. Just like a bomb, with a mushroom cloud that could be seen from fifteen miles away. The flames rolled onto the streets and under automobiles, and over people standing under the awnings of the hardware store. One wave hit the brick side of a building and rolled back on itself. A propane fire is a flash fire, hotter than just a regular fire and more damaging. The intensity is much greater than, let’s say, a house fire. There are no minor burns in a propane explosion. All of the burned were suffering from third-degree burns. Every one of them.
