Historical Marker
Waverly Disaster
Waverly, Humphreys County · Tennessee
The blast changed how Tennessee answers hazardous-material spills. Sixteen people died, and the disaster led the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency to overhaul its methods for responding to spills. It also led the National Transportation Safety Board to strengthen standards, including those for the design and construction of rail cars. Waverly was struck by water decades later, on August 21, 2021, when more than seventeen inches of rain made Trace Creek overflow in the middle of town; twenty people in Humphreys County died in that flood.
What the plaque says
Waverly Disaster On February 24, 1978, two days after a Louisville and Nashville train wrecked on this site, workmen were cleaning up when 22,000 pounds of liquid propane fuel from a derailed tanker car ignited and caused a massive explosion. The blast and resulting fire destroyed a great part of Waverly's old town section that included homes and businesses. Sixteen people were killed in the disaster, including Waverly's police and fire chiefs. More than 200 people suffered injury, and damage was in the millions of dollars.
Where it stands
36.08725, -87.79204 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Johnsonville State Historic Park — 9.9 miA Tennessee River park on the site of a Union supply depot shelled in November 1864 and of the town later drowned by Kentucky Lake, with earthworks, a railroad bed and an African American cemetery.
- Patsy Cline Crash Site Memorial — 21 miAn engraved rock off Mt. Carmel Road near Camden marking where a small plane carrying Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins went down on March 5, 1963.
- Tennessee National Wildlife Refuge — 25 miA 51,000-acre refuge along Kentucky Lake and the Tennessee River, created in 1945 for migratory birds, with a visitor center in Springville and a drowned Archaic site nearby.
- Paris Landing State Park — 29 miA Kentucky Lake state park on the site of a Tennessee River steamboat landing, created after the 1944 TVA dam drowned a sulphur-spring resort.
More markers nearby
- Loretta Webb Lynn — 8.1 mi
- Hattie Wyatt Caraway — 11 mi
- Captain William Robert Anderson — 11 mi
- Ruskin Cave — 16 mi