Just after 10:53 a.m. on Feb. 3, 1971, the ground trembled in the small city of Woodbine, Georgia.
As far away as Jacksonville, residents felt the ground sway beneath them. In Brunswick, just 15 miles to the east, books toppled from shelves and windows cracked. Folks didn't know in that moment that a fiery explosion had engulfed a building at the Thiokol Chemical Corporation.
The blast killed 29 workers, a majority of them Black women, and injured at least 50 more. Scenes from that Wednesday morning continue to haunt the survivors and witnesses to this day. Yet, the trauma and pain prevented most from speaking out about the tragedy for decades.
Credit: Don Ray / Florida Times-Union
Credit: Don Ray / Florida Times-Union
The Thiokol chemical explosion made national headlines and marked a pivotal moment in American history. It's considered one of the worst industrial disasters in the United States, along with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and the West Fertilizer Plant Explosion. Multiple lawsuits jumpstarted a prolonged 17-year legal battle among victims and the Thiokol Chemical Corporation and the U.S. Government, which eventually led to major changes in America's tort reform law. Those reforms were instrumental in developing the formula for compensating the victims and their families after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The disaster also forever changed how firefighters respond to emergencies, triggering the transition from private and funeral home ambulance services to fire department EMS in Jacksonville, FL. And, about three months after the 1971 explosion, the U.S. Congress created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), standards to ensure safe working conditions.
But when the workers first started out at Thiokol, they didn’t anticipate becoming martyrs. They saw the job as a source of income that could lift them and their families out of poverty at a time when decent wages beyond domestic and agricultural jobs were scarce.
“You're born poor, you're born a woman, Black in the South. That's four strikes,” said Jannie Everette, CEO of the Thiokol Memorial Project in Kingsland, Ga., which serves as a remembrance of the tragedy.
Credit: Courtesy of the Thiokol Memorial Project
Credit: Courtesy of the Thiokol Memorial Project
“These people, they took where they were as just a circumstance. They didn't accept it as a destination. They just kept moving on. And if you live during the time to see the women employed, and improving their family life, they bought homes, they bought cars, they sent their kids to college.”
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Working for their families
In this tumultuous post-civil rights period, most of the women in Woodbine and surrounding communities toiled in seafood plants in Brunswick, cleaned rooms in hotels on Jekyll Island or harvested crops on local farms.
“We work by piecework and I wasn't that good at braiding shrimp, so I'd hardly ever made my quota,” said Hattie Dawson Fogle, a Camden resident who eventually worked at the Thiokol plant.
But in 1969, things started to change. Thiokol Chemical Corporation, which had originally located at Woodbine to manufacture solid propellant rocket boosters for the space race, had pivoted to manufacturing Army munitions. Its latest contract with the U.S. Army was to manufacture 756,000 trip flares for the Vietnam War, which, at the time, had lost public support.
The company sent out a notice in the local papers, stating they needed around 55 women to assemble the intricate flares – a device that contained tripwire that, when triggered, illuminated the surrounding area. Woodbine residents saw this as hope.
Credit: Richard Burkhart/Savannah Morning News
Credit: Richard Burkhart/Savannah Morning News
“That was good money during that time,” said Emma Lou Gibbs, a Thiokol worker who survived the explosion. “I bought me a car, then I bought me a trailer. And then I took care of my kids.”
About 60 women eventually went to work at Thiokol. Men fed the assembly line and women worked the stations. Most employees came from nearby communities and knew each other well. Family and close friends worked in close quarters and sang to pass the time. The plant was one of the few companies in the South that employed Black and white, men and women, alongside each other.
‘I could hear the fire coming... it had a voice’
Fires frequently ignited on the line, but workers thought the risk was just part of the job. The company assured employees that there was no danger of explosions.
“We made the (ignition) pellet, which starts the fire,” said Lucille Washington Everette, Jannie’s mother and a survivor of the explosion. “It was really flammable because if you mash (the piece) on too hard, it will jump on. One day, I had some on my shoestring and I went in my living room and I stood in front of the heater. I was on fire just that quick.”
It was only after Feb. 3, 1971, that the misclassification of the chemical materials came to light. The magnesium trip flares were labeled as a class 2 rather than a class 7, drastically changing how the materials were handled and stored.
Credit: Don Ray / Florida Times-Union
Credit: Don Ray / Florida Times-Union
That Wednesday morning, when a fire ignited in building M-132, where the trip flares were assembled, no one knew what was to come. Most of the workers stayed right by the building, believing the fire would be extinguished like the times before. Instead, what followed were three blasts, each one more violent than the last.
“I could hear the fire coming. It had a voice that day. It was really, really something that I didn’t expect,” said Washington Everette.
“The first explosion blew me out of there.”
Credit: Don Ray / Florida Times-Union
Credit: Don Ray / Florida Times-Union
The third and final explosion rattled neighborhood windows. Debris and bodies were blown at least a mile away.
Sue Brown was working in the building that neighbored M-132 when the blast happened. Her husband was a volunteer firefighter in neighboring Kingsland and she had driven his truck to work that day. She crawled to the truck, which was equipped with a dispatch radio. The explosion had cut the phone lines in and out of the plant.
About that time, Morris Peeples, the fire chief for Kingsland, was working in his father’s grocery store. “I happened to be standing at the front door and then all of a sudden there was this big explosion that rattled the windows and the door and everything and, I turned around and said, ’Something bad just happened.’
Brown’s message reached 911 and Chief Peeples.
Credit: Ray Stafford / Florida Times-Union
Credit: Ray Stafford / Florida Times-Union
As Kingsland barreled toward the plant, they also alerted the nearby Jacksonville Fire Department. The department was innovating, becoming the first in the country to train their staff in CPR, which had been invented in 1960. The move would save lives.
“They took the ambulances… put EMT people on the ambulance to resuscitate and triage people in between home and the hospital, and taught America how to do it,” said Jannie Everette.
Credit: Ray Stafford / Florida Times-Union
Credit: Ray Stafford / Florida Times-Union
Help ran down the coast from as far north as Savannah. The injured were rushed to hospitals in St. Marys and Jacksonville. At the time, most remained segregated despite the Civil Right Act being passed seven years earlier, but the sheer breadth of people coming in — Black and white — forced the hospital to integrate. That day, the segregation rule was broken.
Three weeks later, the U.S. Army’s notice about the misclassification of materials arrived at Thiokol.
Remembering Woodbine today
More than four decades later, Jannie Everette, the daughter of one of the Thiokol blast survivors started the Thiokol Memorial Project. Shortly after the tragedy, Everette left Woodbine for a career in the U.S. Army and federal government. When she returned in 2010, she discovered just how little the community knew about the Thiokol explosion of 1971.
Credit: Richard Burkhart/Savannah Morning News
Credit: Richard Burkhart/Savannah Morning News
In an over 500-page history of Camden County, two lines are dedicated to the blast: "One of the most devastating of tragedies in Camden County occurred on February 3,1971, when a magnesium flare assembly building was leveled by a blast, which killed 29 workers and injured many more. Thiokol cooperation was generous in it's help to the injured workers and the families of the deceased."
Everette now runs the Thiokol Memorial Museum in Kingsland, a half-hour drive from the original blast site. She spends her retirement collecting memories and artifacts of Thiokol and is actively pursuing a Congressional Gold Medal for the 29 victims.
“We asked him for our people to be remembered and honored,” Everette said. “Because we need to heal, we need to inspire our young people. And people would come here from all around the world to learn this history.”
Credit: Richard Burkhart/Savannah Morning News
Credit: Richard Burkhart/Savannah Morning News
Someone has to do the job of remembering, she says, someone has to piece together this part of history that the rest of America so willingly forgot.
Nancy Guan is the general assignment reporter covering Chatham County municipalities. Reach her at nguan@gannett.com or on Twitter @nancyguann.
Zach Dennis is the editor of the arts and culture section, and weekly Do Savannah alt-weekly publication at the Savannah Morning News. He can be reached at zdennis@savannahnow.com or 912-239-7706.
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: In 1971, 29 people died in an explosion in Georgia. 52 years later, their story is being told
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