Entering and leaving Mozelle Ridgeway's early-morning geometry class, we could see the flames and smoke clearly. Something north and east of Dalewood Junior High (now Middle School), but still several miles away, was on fire, and it looked devastating.
Fifty years ago Sunday (a Monday in 1972), five gasoline-filled storage tanks at Southern Facilities Inc. on Jersey Pike, began exploding around 6:30 a.m., sending blasts of fire 500 feet into the air that wouldn't be extinguished for 31 hours. Ultimately, four separate explosions occurred, the last five hours later at 11:30 a.m.
Looking back on it from this vantage point, it seemed like the fire went on for the better part of a week, but newspaper accounts say otherwise.
No smartphones with Facebook or Twitter updates were available back then, but we surely must have learned what happened some time that morning.
We certainly all knew where the tanks were, because you could see them off Highway 153 when your parents shepherded you to the new mall in town, the then 1-year-old Northgate across Chickamauga Dam.
"I thought it was the end of the world coming," Evelyn Driggans told a Chattanooga News-Free Press reporter. "That is supposed to be the way it is when Jesus comes back."
She lived within one mile of the blast and had been evacuated to Hillcrest Elementary School on Bonny Oaks Drive.
"I heard a big bang," Mrs. Driggans said, "and then the whole sky lit up."
Mrs. J. Leonard Wallace, who also was evacuated to Hillcrest, said she had just stepped out of the bathtub when she was nearly knocked over by the force of the blast.
"I started to fall," she said, "but I managed to grab hold of the sink. The noise sounded so close that I thought the house behind me had blown up."
About 65 people who lived within a mile of the blast were taken to Hillcrest, part of which had been appropriated as a Red Cross evacuation shelter.
Ultimately, the Southern Facilities plant manager, Don Ross, died of burns from the explosion, two other men who were employees of the adjacent Firestone Synthetic Rubber plant later died, and six more people were less seriously injured.
A single tank at Southern Facilities had been filled early Monday morning, but Ross later apparently perceived that one of the six fuel tanks evidently had a leak. He was shutting off a tank valve when a blast ripped through the area.
Fire officials said the intense fumes throughout the fuel terminal might have been ignited by friction from a vehicle's engine, from an electrical arc or from a spark from a metal shoe tap. What resulted, they said, was "like a blowtorch" that resulted in a sudden and deadly flash fire.
The flames eventually were extinguished, officials said, with about 7,200 gallons of foam, the use of which we take for granted today in the spill of hazardous liquids but which was then apparently fairly new. The foam was both squirted onto the flames as well as into a pipeline that fed the tanks. Officials at the time were afraid the inferno might spread to tanks across Jersey Pike as well as to nearby parked train cars containing hazardous materials.
Reports credited the XL-3 foam and the knowledge of George Herzog, a fuel fires expert flown in from the National Foam Co. of Philadelphia, along with fire crews from Hamilton County, Tri-Community Fire Department, the city of Chattanooga, the city of Collegedale, the city of Cleveland, the city of East Ridge, the city of Fort Oglethorpe, the city of Red Bank, the city of Rossville and Cobb County, Ga., for helping extinguish the blaze.
"We thought we would have to let the fire burn itself out," said Thomas C. Powell, a public affairs specialist for Continental Oil Co., a co-owner of Southern Facilities, "but the foam really did a great job."
A burn specialist from the Baylor School of Medicine in Houston also was brought in by Continental, a co-owner of Southern Facilities, to aid doctors with burn victims at Erlanger Hospital.
City fire officials said it was the city's worst fire since 1920, and city arson investigator Jerry Evans called it the worst devastation he had seen.
Losses in gasoline and in the tanks were estimated in the millions of dollars, and federal investigators were brought in to assess the scene.
A News-Free Press end of the decade retrospective in 1979 tabbed the fire the decade's biggest fire emergency, and it would be an event this Dalewood Junior High student would never forget.