An early morning explosion leveled a Hickman County weapons manufacturing facility and left many unaccounted for, authorities said.
Twisted metal girders and burning cars dotted the landscape as first responders arrived before 8 a.m. on Oct. 10 in the rural Tennessee county about 70 miles west of Nashville.
Hours after the blast, Humphreys County Sheriff Chris Davis said the explosion resulted in fatalities but did not give a number. Visibly emotional, he said there were “19 souls” unaccounted for and that four to five people were taken to area hospitals.
“There’s nothing to describe. It’s gone,” Davis said of the building where the explosion occurred. “It’s the most devastating scene I’ve seen in my career.”
He said he could not say whether the explosion was accidental or intentional.
“We’re going to be slow and methodical and diligent,” Davis said.
In the aftermath, McEwen Mayor Brad Rachford said the city sent rescue personnel to the scene to assist other agencies in recovery efforts — and vowed that the 1,800 residents of the small town would band together and support everyone who’s been impacted.
“A lot of neighbors here and our citizens either have family members that were lost in the tragedy or are affected in some way,” the mayor said.
What we know so far
A single explosion in the “Melt Pour” building leveled it, an employee of the facility told The Tennessean. The employee, who asked not to be named, estimated that fewer than 30 people work inside the Melt Pour building, one of eight metal structures connected by two-lane roads.
The explosion happened on the complex of Accurate Energetic Systems in the Bucksnort area. AES develops, manufactures and supplies a wide range of explosives for the defense, aerospace, mining, oil and gas industries. The company provides mines to the U.S. Army and demolition charges to the U.S. Air Force.
Accurate Energetic Systems, established in 1980, specializes in the creation of high-grade explosives for demolition, according to its website. They make “linear shaped charges to claymore mines.”
“We are dedicated to the development, manufacture, handling, and storage of high-quality energetic products utilized in both defense and commercial markets,” the website said.
The facility is on 1,300 acres with eight production buildings and a quality control lab.
Inside the Melt Pour building, the daily process of making bombs involves melting the explosives in large kettles, transferring the melted material into cannisters, packing the cannisters into boxes, stacking the boxes on palettes and loading the palettes into trucks, the AES employee said.
“Clearly it’s just a devastating tragedy,” State Sen. Kerry Roberts told The Tennessean.
Roberts said there was no evidence the explosion was anything other than accidental. TEMA has deployed district coordinators to support local efforts, and Roberts anticipated federal entities such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms would be involved. AES “responded very quickly,” Roberts said, and has set up a Family Assistance Center to work support those impacted.Three medical helicopters responded to the scene, and Roberts thanked TriStar medical leadership’s immediate incident response.
The explosion forced a one-mile radius evacuation and left residents reeling from even farther away. Beyonica Garrison Holt, a Nunnelly resident, told The Tennessean that the explosion “shook their entire house” nearly 14 miles from the explosion. Holt also said that her electricity had been out since the incident.
Hickman County is a rural Middle Tennessee county of about nearly 25,000 people about a 90-minute drive from Nashville.
Known for being the birthplace of Minnie Pearl and home of the beloved National Banana Pudding Festival, the county was recently rocked by another large explosion that injured one on Aug. 18, 2023, at the Tennessee Gas Pipeline/Kinder Morgan.
Plant had history of past safety issues
In 2020, a “costly and dangerous fire” broke out at Accurate Energetic Systems’ campus, according to court filings.
In the aftermath of the blaze, the company fired James Creech, an employee in AES’ maintenance department who was responsible for maintaining and completing quality control tests on the boilers at the McEwen facility, Creech’s attorney wrote in a 2021 lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee.
The company wrote that Creech’s “failure to perform his job duties in a responsible manner contributed to a costly and dangerous fire at AES’s facility” on Oct. 30, 2020.
Creech indicated the true cause may have been issues with the facility. His attorneys wrote that Creech “was never interviewed regarding the fire, his actions or the deficiencies of the building and/or building materials that were the precipitating cause of the fire.”
Creech said he was actually terminated because of his advanced age and sued Accurate Energetic Systems for age discrimination. The lawsuit was settled after mediation, court records show.
In 2019, the Tennessee Occupational Safety and Health Administration conducted an inspection of the facility after two employees experienced “seizure events” on site before beginning their shifts for the day — and another employee experienced a seizure at home the same morning.
That inspection revealed that five employees had experienced “central nervous system impairment” and had been potentially exposed to the toxic chemical cyclonite through inhalation, ingestion and absorption through the skin. TOSHA issued five “serious” violations and a penalty fine of $7,200.
Accurate Energetic Systems had contested those findings by the end of the year, arguing that its TOSHA citation should be vacated entirely.
The company reached a settlement with the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development. In exchange for paying the fine and instituting a number of changes in the workplace, some of the violations would be deleted entirely and several others would be reclassified to “other-than-serious.” The settlement was approved in 2023.
A negligence and wrongful death lawsuit brought by the widow of the man who died in a 2014 explosion, as well as two people injured in the blast, settled in 2019, court records show.
It’s not clear what, if anything, the plaintiffs received as a result of the settlement.
The lawsuit claims workplace safety standards at the time of the explosion fell below what is required by law.
On April 16, 2014, 23-year-old Rio Ammunition employee Rodney Edwards was installing a steel barrier fixture referred to as a “blast shield” in the lawsuit between gunpowder hoppers. According to the lawsuit, the drill he was using was not designed for use in an explosive environment.
Surrounded by gunpowder, a flash fire occurred and caused an explosion.
Rodney Edwards died. Another employee who sued, Joseph Clark, suffered “catastrophic injuries” including the loss of an eye, two fingers and significant mental faculties, according to the lawsuit. The other employee who sued, Sheila Edwards, suffered severe injuries, the lawsuit states.
Kathryn Edwards, widow of Rodney Edwards, sought $5 million, while Clark sought $4 million and Sheila Edwards sought $750,000 when they filed their lawsuit in Humphreys County Circuit Court on Dec. 1, 2016. They sued Accurate Energetic Systems LLC, its sole member John Sonday and AAC Investments, which did business as Accurate Arms Co.
They had filed an earlier lawsuit that was dismissed, but they were allowed to refile. The 2014 lawsuit settled in 2019.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Officials searching to account for people after bomb manufacturer blast