The trouble began two nights earlier. At about 10:30 p.m. on February 22, twenty-four cars of a 92-car Louisville and Nashville Railroad freight train derailed in the downtown area of Waverly, a small county seat in Humphreys County, about 60 miles west of Nashville. Local emergency services responded immediately, inspecting the wreckage for signs of hazardous material leaks. One of the derailed cars carried liquefied petroleum gas. The responding team examined it and assumed it was a double-walled tank car -- the safer, more robust design. It was not. It was single-walled, a critical distinction that would prove fatal. The initial assessment found no obvious leaks, and crews began the methodical work of clearing the wreckage.

By the next morning, things had grown more complicated. At 5:10 a.m. on February 23, after a miscommunication about the hazardous materials present, the Tennessee Office of Civil Defense sent a hazmat team to assess the situation. They agreed with local officials that the best approach was to keep the tank cars cool with streams of water and evacuate an area around the derailment zone. Gas and electric service was shut off. For the next day and a half, crews worked to stabilize the scene and begin removing the damaged cars. The LPG tank car remained on site. Unbeknownst to anyone, the derailment had opened a crack in its single wall -- a fracture that worsened as crews attempted to move the car off the tracks. Pressure inside the tank was building with no visible warning.

At 2:58 p.m. on February 24, the car suffered a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion -- a BLEVE. The detonation was instantaneous and devastating. Six people died on the spot. Fragments of the tank car were hurled hundreds of feet. Both of the town's fire trucks, parked near the scene, were destroyed. Waverly's fire chief, Wilbur York, was killed. So was police chief Guy Barnett. Tennessee Office of Civil Defense investigator Mark Belyew, members of the L&N wreck crew, and several nearby residents also perished. In all, sixteen people lost their lives and forty-three others were injured. By 7:00 p.m. the fires were under control, but the search for casualties had to be halted due to poor visibility and did not resume until 5:30 the next morning. Local residents were not allowed to return home until February 26. Property damage was estimated at $1.8 million -- equivalent to roughly $6.3 million today.

The National Transportation Safety Board investigation placed blame on the tank car itself: the derailment had cracked the single wall, and moving the car off the tracks had worsened the fracture until the vessel could no longer contain its pressurized contents. The NTSB commended Waverly for its preparedness but laid bare a systemic problem -- the people handling the emergency had no standardized training for hazardous materials incidents. The Waverly disaster, along with a major train derailment in Mississauga, Ontario in November 1979, forced a nationwide reckoning. Tennessee created the Hazardous Materials Institute in 1980, establishing training standards for hazmat responders. Since its formation, no Tennessee emergency responder has died at a hazmat site. The disaster was also cited by a National Governors Association study as one of the catalysts for the creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, established by President Jimmy Carter's executive order in 1979.

Sixteen structures destroyed, twenty more seriously damaged, a fire department left without a single truck, a police force without its chief -- the physical scars healed, but the institutional memory endures. Waverly's tragedy became a textbook case in emergency management, studied at fire academies and disaster preparedness courses across the country. The lesson was brutal but clear: courage and good intentions are not substitutes for proper training and accurate information. A single-wall tank car misidentified as double-walled, a crack invisible to untrained eyes, a cleanup procedure that no one realized was making things worse -- each link in the chain of failure pointed to the same conclusion. The people who died in Waverly, many of them running toward the danger rather than away from it, changed the way America protects the people who protect everyone else.