640 Tons of Chlorine, a Few Blocks From Downtown Louisville

Six hundred and forty tons of liquid chlorine, pinned under a dam gate, a few blocks from downtown Louisville.

How a city emptied thirty-five square blocks with nobody hurt. And why the after-action study found the two agencies in charge could not talk to each other.

Every photograph was made by one man, Bill Strode, on assignment number two for the brand-new E P A. His typed subject list ends with a pool hall.

The newspapers told it in black and white. Nothing here is colorized. This is Kodachrome, fifty-four years old.

At five fifteen in the morning on Sunday, March nineteenth, a southbound tow of nine barges hit the head of Shippingport Island. Four broke loose. One was recovered. One sank, loaded with chrome ore. One came to rest against the power plant, carrying sulfuric acid. The fourth lodged in the second gate of the dam.

Why it happened was never settled. The pilot testified he gave the usual signal for the railroad drawbridge. One whistle blast, and a spotlight on the tender's hut. The bridge tender said he saw the light, and heard no whistle. The bridge stayed down, the tow slowed, and the current did the rest.

The Corps of Engineers put the event in its own district history. Twelve years later, its historian gave the emergency a chapter heading.

Aboard the barge in the gate, in the history's words: four gleaming white steel tanks, containing six hundred and forty tons of liquid chlorine.

Liquid chlorine is stored under pressure. Released, it becomes a gas heavier than air. The District opened its emergency operations center, ordered gas masks from Fort Knox, and called the Vicksburg District, which had handled a chlorine barge on the Mississippi a few years earlier.

On March twentieth, the Engineers, the Coast Guard, chemical companies and marine salvage men met to decide what could even be done. The Coast Guard admiral on the scene took command of the site.

The Environmental Protection Agency set up monitors to detect any leak. Its photographer was already in town.

The city, meanwhile, was slower to move. For the first week there was little emergency planning at all. When the first big multi-agency meeting finally convened, one official described it to the researchers as just a lot of hollering.

The Office of Emergency Preparedness at first hesitated to release disaster funds. No disaster had occurred. The potential was real. One vented tank would form a toxic cloud the wind could drive directly over Louisville. But the paperwork had no box for a disaster that had not happened yet.

So the machinery improvised. Gas masks and searchlight trucks from Fort Knox. Helicopters with gas detectors from Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. Radios from the Lexington depot. Air Force weather experts to watch the wind. And an Army hospital train, on standby.

By the last week of March, the plan was on shop windows.

A restaurant owner in the Portland neighborhood lettered his own notice. This is an emergency. To evacuate Saturday morning.

Mayor Frank Burke chose a quadrant plan. Portland, the section of the city nearest the dam, would empty during the critical hours of the salvage. The Corps history records the count. Four thousand two hundred and sixty-six residents moved out on April first, without incident.

Saturday morning, nine o'clock. Buses for the people without cars.

Memorial Hospital had spent the week sending patients home. The last thirty-two moved out to a suburban school, with their nurses.

The hospital building itself was handed to the police and the National Guard, who set up a field command post there. The caption puts the number asked to leave, mandatory and voluntary together, at more than twenty-six thousand.

Cots in a borrowed gym.

Shelter registration. A hundred and ninety-five people signed in. Nearly everyone else went to family, or to friends in the country.

By noon the mandatory area was clear. The parking meters kept the time.

The police had expected trouble holding an emptied neighborhood. There were three arrests, fewer than a normal Saturday. One officer told the researchers plainly. We were in error.

The study's footnote lists all three. Public drunkenness. Hit and run. And sightseeing, with failure to obey a police officer.

Easter morning, a salvage rig built from two Navy minesweeper hulls eased into the current. A camera on the power plant carried it live on television. At ten fifty-six, the cables had the barge, in the history's words, snugly under control.

The chlorine was pumped off over days, into an empty barge alongside. Among the sixty Corps men who rigged the cables atop the barge, the history counts the injuries. Not a single one. Not even a mashed thumb.

The mayor wrote the District a letter. The people of Louisville and surrounding areas recognize the heroism and excellence of your work.

That could have been the whole story. In April, two field teams of sociologists came to interview everyone who had run the emergency. What they wrote down is on this page. Some local officials got their information about the barge not from the federal government, but from the live television camera on the dam.

The federal agencies ran one operations center, in the Federal Building downtown. The city ran its own, at City Hall. A direct phone line connected them. It did not help. To the locals, the federal men were arrogant and highhanded. To the outsiders, the locals were inept.

The evacuation itself was a model. A city section moved out and moved back in a weekend. And still the study's central finding is this sentence. The two key organizations, whose entire role was coordination, could not coordinate themselves.

A month earlier, that sentence had six hundred and forty tons riding on it.

The barge came out of the gate. The river went back to being the city's front porch. The Belle of Louisville, lit for an evening run.

That spring there was a wedding on her deck.

The federal captions on these frames call the boat the Belle of Louisiana. Her name is the Belle of Louisville. The file never corrected it.

A fife and drum corps on the waterfront, where the steamboat docks.

The new waterfront, with paddle-wheelers tied up two deep.

People came down to the bank just to watch them run.

The Belle underway, wheel churning.

A steamboat at sunset.

The Louisville Sailing Club held its fourth annual Sunfish regatta.

Sails on brown water.

One participant, between boat and river.

The river patrol helped a man get his motor started.

State and county police patrolled the water, the skyline behind them.

A yacht took on fuel at the river station.

Houseboats at the dock.

Small boats under the stone arches.

A tent on the bank.

Campers, with their boat hauled out.

A picnic on the bank, over a fire.

A girl collecting rocks and shells at the waterline.

A boy in the river, near Louisville.

Children afloat in midstream.

Two watchers in shadow, swimmers beyond.

The file titles this one, trouble on the Ohio River.

A pleasure craft aground on the bank.

And the pool hall. The last item on the assignment's own subject list.

In September, Strode photographed the other emergency. The one with no evacuation plan.

His caption for these aerials is one word. Smog.

The sun, reduced to a dull disc.

It lingered over the skyline.

From a downtown high-rise, an automobile junkyard in the middle of the city.

Newspapers spilled from a passing truck, littering Sixth and Broadway.

A fireworks stand, filed by the photographer under the heading, visual pollution.

The chlorine barge was never the only casualty on this stretch of river. Strode also photographed a barge burning on the water.

Fourteen weeks after the evacuation, on July tenth, the President signed an act to promote the safety of ports, harbors, waterfront areas, and navigable waters of the United States. It had been in Congress since before the barge broke loose.

Its first listed power reads like a memo from the dam. To establish, operate, and maintain vessel traffic services and systems.

The Corps history draws the line itself. Litigation over the barge ran six years. And the new act meant, in its words, creation of a traffic control system for the port of Louisville.

Before the system arrived, it happened again. January fifteenth, nineteen seventy-four. Another tow lost its barges against Markland Dam, upstream. One of them leaked chemicals used for preserving grain. The Corps historian titled that chapter Operation Big Stink.

The Coast Guard's vessel traffic service at Louisville was created in nineteen seventy-three, and it still switches on when the river runs high. Its own user manual, revised in two thousand eight, gets the founding month wrong. It says February. Every record from nineteen seventy-two says March.

The study was never secret. It was simply filed. And one line of it travels well. What people believe to be so, is so, insofar as consequences are concerned.

If your family left Portland that Easter weekend, the comments are open. The photographs are free at the National Archives.