This is a blog version of a Facebook posting from August 14, 2020.
Tale of a tragedy. Early in the morning of Tuesday, July 14, 1942, a pair of explosion at a bulk fuel storage facility in Waynesville, NC, killed six people, and also fatally injured Fire Chief Lawrence Kerley. Below are a pair of images from the Waynesville Mountaineer on July 16. Read that digital issue.
Some time around 3:00 a.m. an employee at the Standard Oil Company “bulk plant” on Water street discovered gasoline leaking from one of three horizontal storage tanks. He called the Fire Chief, who responded in a town car.
Chief Kerley was apparently near the plant office when fumes from the leak ignited, at 3:20 a.m., and caused the tank to exploded. The chief ran about 400 yards to a nearby home, his clothing in flames. The resident at the house rushed him to Haywood County Hospital. (He would die from his injuries a month later.)
The storage tank, with one end sheared off and landing 50 feet away, was thrown against a parked gasoline tanker truck, and then landed 250 feet away, on the other side of the highway, and over a row of rail cars and their tracks. (While knocking over one of said coal cars.)
The blast also set aflame the nearby residence of the Caldwell family, where the wife and two children were reportedly killed instantly. The husband escaped his burning house and was found 100 yards away by a policeman. The husband died at the hospital at 7:30 a.m. that morning.
Also critically injured was the oil company employee, who died the following day, and a truck driver, who died four days later. Continue reading ‘Waynesville Fire Chief Lawrence Kerley Killed in Explosion – July 14, 1942’ »