T.A. Gillespie Plant Explosion

The T.A. Gillespie Company Shell Loading Plant was a major producer of ammunition for World War I. Workers in the plant handled tons of trinitrotoluol, a highly explosive chemical compound more commonly known as TNT, and amatol, another volatile material, for the production of shells. The T.A. Gillespie Plant was said to have the highest output of shells in the world.(1)

On October 4, 1918, one of the units in the plant exploded. It was theorized that the machinery used to melt the TNT malfunctioned or that a chisel used to clean the shells sparked the TNT. The true cause was not immediately known because of the many deaths of witnesses but later was declared by a night official to be caused by a fire, the cause of which was undetermined.(2)

When the explosions began, the 2,000 men on shift tried to escape the maze of buildings in the plant but the majority were killed or wounded. One of the survivors reported that, "there was one great blast after another as we ran, accompanied by flashes of yellow light brighter than day, and as the big flashes disappeared the sky would be full of smaller explosions, as loaded and half-loaded shells, which were thrown into the air, exploded. Glass came down like rain, and pieces of steel from the shells and chunks of concrete would come down in a shower after each explosion." The plants stood at a distance of 200 feet from each other. Because of the close vicinity of neighboring plants, once the Gillespie explosion occurred, a chain reaction of explosions followed. After the primary explosions, these several smaller explosions continued to go off periodically. Workers fled in all directions. Those who made it to the barbed wire fence enclosing the plant couldn't find any exits and had to climb over. The fence was six feet tall and was surrounded by a swamp, all designed to keep spies and others out of the factory. Because of the chaotic evacuation, there was no way to get an accurate count of deaths afterward.(3) The T.A. Gillespie Plant was surprisingly underprepared for the case of an emergency such as this. The employers were confident that the units were spaced far enough apart in the case of an explosion so they did not account for the possibility that an explosion could occur that would be powerful enough to cross that distance. Because of this, there was also no procedure for evacuation and a lack of emergency exits. If provisions such as these had been in place, the resulting amount of deaths could have been greatly reduced.

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The Reaction

Despite all of the faults in the company's state of preparedness, no preventative actions were taken after the event because of the ongoing war: World War I. There was great pride associated with America's participation in the war against the Central Powers, primarily due to successful national propaganda and journalism. Many surviving workers in the plant, in fact, immediately returned to work in order to support the soldiers overseas because of the high demand for ammunition, which was expended at an especially high rate. At the time of the explosion, the United States had been fighting alongside the Allies for a year and 7 months, with high production and rapid consumption of war goods. If the Gillespie plant, which was a major supplier of ammunition, ceased production then the supply of shells for the war effort would be largely depleted. The war ended almost a month after the T.A. Gillespie Explosion, on November 11, 1918. At the time of its destruction, the plant valued $18,000,000 and was abandoned after the end of the war effort. A decade later, in 1929, a memorial was erected in memory of the unidentified casualties of the accident.(4)

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Sources: 

(1) New York Times (NY), "Great Munition Plant Blown Up; 100 May Be Dead," October

    5, 1918, 2.

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(2) Ibid.

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(3) Ibid. 

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(4) "Rediscovering the Ruins of a Catastrophic WWI Explosion Everyone Forgot," Atlas
     Obscura, Last modified 2018, Accessed May 20, 2018, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/
     the-explosion-of-the-t-a-gillespie-company-shell-loading-plant.