GRANITEVILLE - When the two engines of Norfolk Southern train 192 slammed into a locomotive parked on a spur line, it delivered a poison dart to the heart of the mill towns that line Aiken County's Horse Creek Valley.
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South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (right), talks with Avondale Mills spokesman Stephen Felker Jr. the day of the wreck. Mill officials suspended operations at its plants Jan. 6, and Mr. Sanford declared a state of emergency in Aiken County.
Ron Cockerille/Staff
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Linda Tyler, with her sister Katherine Christia and uncle Boyd Tyler, holds the funeral announcement for her brother, Willie Lee Tyler, one of the nine people who were killed. Mr. Tyler was one of six Avondale Mills employees who died after the wreck.
Ron Cockerille/Staff
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Jennifer Barton, who lives on Hillview Drive, prepares to settle back in her home. More than 5,000 people were forced to evacuate, some for a week, to avoid the chlorine. The pink tag on her door requests her house be checked for contamination.
Ron Cockerille/Staff
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Contract workers tie down one of the damaged cars onto another railroad car to be moved.
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Deadly chlorine gushed from a single, ruptured tank car carrying 90 tons of the potent chemical, quickly turning into a yellowish-green, ground-hugging fog that killed nine people, including six Avondale Mills employees.
The choking vapors penetrated seven facilities that form the heart of a company town founded in 1849 by William Gregg, the owner of Graniteville Manufacturing Co.
Contamination from the wreck's initial blast of corrosive chlorine forced Avondale Mills officials to shutter all of their Graniteville facilities, including three plants and a warehouse more than a mile from the wreck, idling about 1,700 workers.
As the sole survivor of a once-robust textile industry that dominated the area, Avondale's travails and worries are reverberating throughout a community populated by the sons and daughters of mill workers.
"It's a ghost town right now, and it'll be a ghost town forever if something happens to Avondale Mills," said Bobby Whittle, 65, a cleaning service employee forced last week to evacuate from his Ascauga Lake Road home.
Folks like Mr. Whittle can trace a legacy of yarn and fabric back through two or three generations living and dying in a place known simply as The Valley. His parents, Albert and Ola Mae, were mill workers. He worked at Avondale Mills' Gregg Division plant for 12 years.
Such family traditions heighten the sense of loss from the wreck, whether or not people knew the dead and their families.
"We are textile people," said Charles Hilton, the general manager of Breezy Hill Water and Sewer Co., the regional utility that supplies water to Graniteville. "Our heritage is textiles. That is ingrained in us."
What's also ingrained is the fear that theirs is an industry in steep decline. Valley people have lived through the wrenching shakeout of the 1980s, watching as mainstays such as the Clearwater Finishing Plant, the Bath Mill, the Seminole Mill and the Granite Mill were shut down. Avondale Mills, which bought the Graniteville complex in 1996, has stayed afloat by aggressively modernizing its plants, including a purchase of automated equipment costing $30 million to $40 million for its Gregg Division plant several years ago.
the wreck of Norfolk Southern 192 has left the mill community burdened with grief and uncertain about its economic future.
There's the grief caused by death - six in this disaster and five other Avondale Mills employees in a Nov. 10 car-train collision less than a quarter-mile north on the same rail line.
There are also worries that this disaster has done long-term damage that will make it difficult for the company to recover, but its leadership remains optimistic.
On Thursday, Avondale Mills Chief Executive Officer Stephen Felker Sr. vowed his company would resurrect its Graniteville operations, despite the damage. By week's end, Avondale Mills officials struggled to jump-start operations at three plants and a warehouse on the periphery of a mandatory evacuation zone. They also expressed relief that the destructive potential of chlorine on the phone lines, computers, control boxes and sophisticated automated machinery of their plants and offices near the wreck site wasn't as bad as predicted.
They face a mixed bag of corrosive destruction. Along with a wiped out data processing center, officials say the Stevens Steam Plant is so damaged they'll have to bring in three temporary boilers to run the Gregg Division plant, which seems to have the lightest damage. The Woodhead Division plant was so contaminated that, as of Thursday, company officials said they hadn't been inside to assess the damage.
Still, Mr. Felker said that within a few days after getting the temporary boilers fired up he can have the Gregg Division plant producing finished fabric.
"We want to open it all up," he said.
Mr. Felker understands the family tradition of mill work in Graniteville. He started working in a mill at 16, one of two his family owned in Monroe, Ga. He still lives in that mill town east of Atlanta.
"I'm a fourth-generation textile guy," he said. "I understand because my heritage is ingrained in a small, Southern community where the mill was very important. So I understand the family connection, the mill connection."
People pray Avondale Mills can quickly reopen. They hope the Graniteville complex doesn't join the line of shuttered mills.
"There's no question the economic vitality of our area is at stake," said state Sen. Tommy Moore, D-Clearwater. "It's not just The Valley. Lots of Aiken County is dependent on Avondale Mills."
Mr. Moore should know.
One of the prime clients of his boiler business is Avondale Mills. On the Tuesday before the wreck, he was on the rooftop of the Stevens Steam Plant, checking a suspected leak on the economizer, energy-saving machinery that routes hot flue gases to preheat boiler water.
TALK TO SOMEONE BORN in Graniteville or elsewhere in The Valley. Chances are, they'll quickly reveal their textile heritage. Mr. Moore's mother, Mae, once worked the third shift at Avondale Mills' Hickman Plant.
Consider Mr. Hilton.
His mother, Thelma, worked for Graniteville Manufacturing Co. His father, Charles, worked for the Valley's other big textile concern, United Merchants.
Mr. Hilton is also chairman of the board of deacons at First Baptist Church in Graniteville, one of 11 churches in the one-mile evacuation zone.
He knows none of the people killed by the chlorine gas. It doesn't matter. He said he feels the area's communal grief.
For others, there's a more direct connection.
State Rep. Roland Smith, R-Langley, who worked for more than 15 years in the now-closed Clearwater Finishing Mill, is the half-uncle of John Laird, one of three workers from the Woodhead Division plant killed in the accident.
Mr. Smith is also the half-uncle of Mike Craig, one of four Stevens Steam Plant workers who climbed a fire escape ladder to the roof of the building to escape the clouds created by nearly 40 tons of chlorine spilling from a ruptured tank car just yards from his plant.
For two hours, Mr. Craig, a boiler operator, kept a shirt he grabbed from a rack in the plant's control room wrapped around his face, struggling to breathe.
"IT WAS SO PANICKY and horrifying - just gagging for your last breath," said Mr. Craig, 42, of Langley.
His lungs and throat were seared by chlorine. He says he has difficulty breathing. He also says he'll work for the mill again.
"I don't think it was their fault," he said.
Mr. Craig was one of about 127 graveyard shift employees who had to run for their lives in the darkness early that Thursday morning. The quick and the lucky made their escape from buildings scattered along the lip and bottom of an irregularly shaped bowl of ground surrounding the wreck.
The bodies of those who didn't make it marked the random deadliness of the chlorine gas. Two ran straight into the killing chlorine fog that lurked in the swampy, wooded lowland behind the Woodhead Division plant. Others were overtaken near their work stations - one in an office of the Gregg Division plant, another in a break room of the same building, a third on a loading dock near a ladder his co-workers used to climb to a precarious, temporary haven on the roof of the Stevens Steam plant.
Willie Lee Tyler, 57, was found three days after the wreck, 25 feet from the entrance of the Woodhead Division plant.
Mr. Tyler, of Aiken, had worked in the mill for 35 years, said his youngest sister, Linda. Her older brother loved singing gospel music at Sardis Baptist Church in Salley, not far from his country birthplace. Music was a lifelong passion, she said. He formed a gospel quartet as a teenager.
He was also a faithful member of the Avondale Mills family.
"He'd go in early to get his work done," his sister said. "It was like a second home to him."
It was also a family tradition. Mr. Tyler's brother, Ed, still works for Avondale Mills, she said. Two other sisters are former employees.
"People have worked there for so long, they feel like they're related," Ms. Tyler said. "They always have that in common, even if they no longer work in the mill."
Reach Jim Nesbitt at (803) 648-1395, ext. 111, or jim.nesbitt@augustachronicle.com.
Special Section: Graniteville Train Wreck
On January 6, 2005, a Norfolk Southern Corp. freight train carrying chemicals hit a parked train near an Avondale Mills plant in Graniteville, South Carolina. The impact caused poisonous chlorine gas to leak from three of the moving train's cars. Nine people were killed and more than 5,000 people were evacuated from the site.
For complete coverage of the Graniteville train wreck, visit our special section.
