Blown Sky High

B.C. Murray

INTRODUCTION

No one dreamed things could get worse. Ever since the malaise of the Jimmy Carter days began, the whole country had gone into the tank. Interest rates reached double digits. Layoffs from manufacturing firms and stores were at their highest since the Great Depression. This so-called stagflation was new, economists said. Never before had the country simultaneously experienced a sluggish economy with high-interest rates and record unemployment. Adding insult to injury, the damn Russians were having a field day manipulating and embarrassing our Southern president, who didn’t seem to be able to manage even a Girl Scott bake sale if his life depended on it.

As part of the most economically depressed state in the Union, Columbia and Marion County, Mississippi, usually felt only a marginal impact when the country’s economy regressed. Hell, until the area’s oil boom of the 1970s, Columbia was like a remote pine tree-covered island muddling along without a care in the world about anything short of the release of a new Lynyrd Skynyrd album. This time things were different.

Stagflation came at a time when oil and gas drilling in the area had ebbed. The timber industry continued its decline, and Bud’s Bargain Stores, a one hundred store five and dime store chain based in Columbia, was sold and relocated to seemingly greener pastures back East. Local businesses welcomed fewer customers who could purchase little due to the area’s high unemployment. Churches, not exempt from the depressed economy, saw tithes and offerings from their congregations shrivel from a monsoon down to a trickle.

A few months prior, men working in the oil patch and earning salaries equal to or greater than the town’s college-educated citizens were now facing layoffs and bills they could not pay. Their wives, spoiled by the income provided by the oil industry, couldn’t understand why the gravy train had come to a halt. They were accustomed to having their husbands away from home for two weeks every month on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. These women were now babysitting their bored, bitter, and often inebriated out-of-work husbands. At home, husbands were also cramping the lifestyles of many wives who had comfortably settled into adulterous affairs with clandestine lovers. A record number of divorces resulted while these families witnessed their new expensive automobiles, boats, jewelry, and other luxury items become the property of banks and stores that provided financing.

But things did get worse. On a Saturday morning in March of 1977, the creosote plant, another significant employer in town, blew its top like Mount Etna, spewing chemicals and debris throughout a one-quarter-mile area in the city. The plant had sat between downtown and the local high school for so long that people hardly ever gave it any thought. With its tin-walled exterior resembling an overgrown barn or mechanics shed, the creosote plant was visibly overwhelmed by flashy road signs and car dealerships with brand-spanking-new automobiles out front.

Creosote is a wood preservative used on railroad ties and utility poles. This yellowish-to-greenish-brown liquid contains corrosive acidic, flammable compounds linked to cancer and neurological problems. In addition to creosote, the plant, for years, had been producing other potentially hazardous chemicals without the public’s knowledge.

On the day of the explosion, a one-half-mile area city officials barricaded off a one-half-mile area around the plant, and businesses shuttered suddenly. Even the high school baseball team conducting its weekly Saturday morning practice nearby had to evacuate. A Dodge pickup appeared suddenly, and a scruffy old man dressed in farmer’s overalls hopped out, ran to the baseball field’s backstop screen, and cried, “Get out! Get out now! We don’t know what is in there!”

Despite the man’s warnings, the baseball coach saw nothing more important than completing the team’s practice session. “We’ll get a move on as soon as we finish taking infield.” the square-headed coach dressed in blue polyester coaching shorts and a gold shirt and cap featuring the school’s logo responded. After speaking to the man in the overalls, the coach turned around to see his players had dashed to their cars and driven off slinging gravel, leaving the bewildered coach alone, holding a bat at home plate.

Chemicals with names ending in “ene,” “ine,” “sol,” and “nol” shot like cannon fire through the plant’s roof and into the atmosphere. Instantly, an extended, strange sense of death permeated, further exasperating the townspeople. Within minutes, more Columbians joined the hundreds of others out of work.

More disturbing was the possibility that these funny-named chemicals could seep into the nearby Jingling Creek and the town’s water wells less than one-quarter mile away. If the town’s water supply became contaminated, an epic environmental disaster would exist and wreak havoc on the community’s already desperate condition. Enticing industry to a small, depressed South Mississippi town was tough enough. Having to confess to prospects that cancer-causing carcinogens were present in the water supply would destroy the city, making Columbia’s future as hopeless as it had ever been during its long and storied history.

Highway 43, also known as Old River Road, parallels the Pearl River and runs through the middle of Marion County. Discovered by French-Canadian explorer Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville during the 1600s, the Pearl River snakes through South Mississippi and serves as a boundary between Mississippi and Louisiana. South of Columbia and Marion County, Old River Road passes through Pear River County, Mississippi, and eventually ends in Hancock County, bordering the Mississippi Sound. Southern Hancock County exemplifies Mississippi Noble Laureate William Faulkner’s description of the Gulf Coast as an area “where pine barrens and moss-hung live oaks give way to grassy marshes so flat and low and treeless that they seem less of earth than water. More of a beginning than the end of the land.”

The Old River Road passed through the most rural part of Hancock County, including the community of Kiln, known to locals as “The Kiln.” Because it produced illegal whiskey for the Gulf Coast and New Orleans spirit markets for over one hundred years, The Kiln was called “the Moonshine Capital of Mississippi.” Surrounding The Kiln are thousands of acres of long leaf pine forests and swamps that provide perfect cover from the law for moonshiners and other purveyors of illegal activity.

Following the launch of Sputnik in 1957, President Eisenhower began laying the groundwork for a state-of-the-art space exploration program to compete with and surpass the Soviets. Before rockets reached the launching pad, manufacturing and testing were required. The planning and design would occur at Marshal Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The construction and assembly would occur at the Michoud Assembly Facility just east of New Orleans.

Testing rocket engines powerful enough to send a man to the moon and back require an extremely isolated area tolerating massive explosions, and jolts heard and felt for miles. With its plethora of trees, swamps, and access to the Gulf of Mexico, rural Hancock County was the ideal site for NASA's rocket engine tests. Also, making this site attractive was its limited population. Property acquisitions occurred between the U.S. government and local citizens, allowing the southwest corner of Hancock County to become home to the Mississippi Test Facility. Later, the facility’s name changed to the John C. Stennis Space Center in honor of Mississippi’s influential and highly-respected United States Senator. To provide maximum security and buffer space for the massive explosions at Stennis, the federal government acquired 125,000 acres of pine and coastal wetlands surrounding the space center property for use as a buffer zone with rigorous use restrictions. Essentially, NASA created a no man’s land in this bootlegger haven where rocket engine tests could occur in a secure, completely isolated environment.

Before construction on the space center, the government relocated five small, once thriving and now dying, lumber mill communities outside the buffer zone. These communities were founded nearly 175 years earlier in a different era when timber was king in South Mississippi. One community, Napoleon, was founded as early as 1798. Lumber companies took advantage of the area’s vast pine forests and access to the Pearl River that empties into the Gulf of Mexico south of Pearlington, Mississippi. A combined population of seven hundred families living in Gainesville, Logtown, Napoleon, Westonia, and Santa Rosa had their land appropriated during the relocation.

Meanwhile, remnants of these former communities, including streets, stores, schools, and other structures, remained. Situated in what is known as Honey Island Swamp are the remains of Santa Rosa. Before establishing the test facility, Santa Rosa included a couple of stores, a church, a post office, and a one-room schoolhouse. In addition, Santa Rosa served as a refuge for pirates operating along the Mississippi Gulf Coast during the 19th century. Now, the only visitor to Santa Rosa and the other former communities is Father Time. With the help of hurricanes and other acts of nature, he gradually eroded most of the remaining proof that these communities existed.

The Stennis Space Center was constructed and began firing and testing rocket engines for...