Armory Explosion

For Salemtowne residents, Silas Creek Parkway is a familiar stretch of road, we drive it almost daily for one reason or another. As you drive south down Silas Creek Parkway toward Peters Creek Parkway, just as you pass Forsyth Technical Community College on the right, as you go down the hill you will see the NC Army National Guard Armory on the right. It looks calm and peaceful now but on a Saturday morning in September 1969, it was the site of one of Winston-Salem's most tragic disasters. Some Salemtowne residents were involved in the disaster or its aftermath.

Armory

The armory was only 6 years old at the time of the disaster. Construction bids for the $220,000 facility were opened on June 14, 1962, for a joint-use building that would house both the 230th Transportation Battalion of the North Carolina National Guard and a training academy for the Winston-Salem Police Department. It replaced the Guard's previous home on Patterson Avenue, occupied since 1920.

The new armory, sitting on eight acres on the south side of the newly built Silas Creek Parkway, was dedicated on October 18, 1963. The police department moved into its west wing that same year, complete with a classroom, library, offices, and an indoor shooting range shared with the Guard. By April 1969, the Guard had fully consolidated its operations there, closing out its old Patterson Avenue building for good.

Lurking Danger

Less than 100 yards away from the armory sat the city's sanitary landfill, which had opened in late 1949 but there was an earlier trash dump on the site that opened in the 1930s. By the late 1960s, neighbors were complaining regularly about the odor, flies, and rats the landfill attracted. Underneath those everyday nuisances was a more serious problem: methane gas, produced as buried garbage decayed, collecting in a large underground culvert and venting slowly into the surrounding area.

Warning Signs

City officials were aware of the risk. On November 11, 1968, the city's Public Works Committee recommended closing the landfill within six months, though it stayed open due to difficulty finding an alternative site.⁸ There had already been small warning signs:

A handful of minor fires had occurred at the landfill that required digging up smoldering trash and dousing it with hundreds of thousands of gallons of water

In 1965, a National Guardsman soldering a gutter sparked a small explosion, but he was not injured.

Previously, during a training session, a group of firemen were standing near a drain culvert. One lit a cigarette and tossed away the match. Gas that had settled in the drain system exploded. The two firemen were treated and released from the hospital.

None of these earlier incidents caused serious harm so no action was taken; however, that would soon change.

Friday, September 26, 1969

In the days before the explosion, guardsmen at the armory had reported feeling woozy and having trouble breathing in the supply room. City officials investigated on Friday, September 26, but found no leaking gas. At 10:00 p.m., Fire Captain D. R. Hasting, who was conducting the fire department's investigation, said there had been no significant increase of gas in the armory but firemen would continue monitoring the gas level at two-hour intervals through the next day. The armory building would remain open and fully ventilated through the night. The weekend drill scheduled for the next morning was allowed to proceed.

Saturday, September 27, 1969, The Fateful Day

At 7:30 that morning, an estimated 300 members of the 230th Transportation and Supply Battalion reported to the armory for annual firearms practice. Just before 8:40, eight to ten guardsmen were inside the supply room next to the large drill hall. Some of them were cooks getting kitchen equipment, others were picking up their weapons before heading to the firing range.

Unbeknownst to them, recent rain and fog had trapped methane fumes underground, preventing them from dispersing safely into the atmosphere. The gas seeped up through cracks in the concrete floor of the supply room and was ignited — possibly by nothing more than a spark from a shoe scraping against an exposed nail.

At 8:40 a.m., an explosion flashed through the room with intense heat — estimated afterward at 1,200 degrees. There was no visible fire, just a blast of momentary intense flames.

The explosion seared the walls and ceiling, blew out windows, slammed the supply room door shut and locked it, and lifted the building's southeast roof corner eight inches. The blast was felt blocks away. When someone finally found a key and opened the door, heat and dark blue flames poured out, burning several guardsmen standing 5 to 15 feet away.

Guardsmen with burned uniforms stumbled out of the supply room. Fellow soldiers wrapped them in blankets and began first aid on the drill hall floor before the first firefighters even arrived.

City Responds

The emergency response drew on every resource the city had. Officials summoned all available ambulances, firemen, and police — a dozen or more ambulances responded, including county and rescue-squad vehicles and even private funeral cars were pressed into service. Some of the less severely injured were driven to hospitals in police patrol cars, while officers sealed off nearby intersections to clear the way.

Military Responds

Seven of the most critically burned guardsmen required specialized care beyond what local hospitals could offer. The next evening, Sunday, September 27, an Air Force medical transport plane landed at Smith-Reynolds Airport to carry them, along with several of their wives, to the Army's Brooke Burn Center at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas.

A special burn team of surgeons and medics had flown in aboard the plane. Patients were carried on stretchers from Baptist and Forsyth Memorial hospitals up a steel ramp into the aircraft, which departed shortly after 9 p.m. as some 250 onlookers — family, friends, and the guardsmen, police, and firefighters who had responded to the disaster — watched from behind a railing as red lights from fire trucks illuminated the scene.

The Toll

Of the 25 injured, three ultimately died from their injuries:

Spec. 5 Dalton K. Koontz, 27, died October 10, 1969. Koontz was seriously burned, with over 60 percent of his body burned. He had been under intensive care since the explosion and was conscious until the time of his death. He was survived by his wife and two children, ages 2 and 11.

Sgt. Robert M. Coltrane died October 10, 1969. Coltrane had sustained burns over 76 percent of his body. He was survived by his wife, who was expecting a child within the next three weeks.

Master Sgt. Joel Calhoun Jr., 39, died October 29, 1969. Calhoun was survived by his wife and 10-year-old daughter.

Of the 22 who survived, nine were hospitalized for extended periods and later declared between 30 and 100 percent disabled, all eventually receiving full federal disability benefits; but those benefits did not come easily.

Aftermath

Behind that final outcome was years of dogged advocacy from Lt. Col. James N. Stoneman, who spent more than four years navigating the paperwork required for each of the 25 men's individual case files; by his own account he signed his name more than 1,500 times over three nights of one stretch alone. For the three men who did not survive, Stoneman worked to have them retired on disability as quickly as possible; two died on the day they were retired, the third the day after.

The armory explosion also had a lasting legal legacy: in 1972, the city lost its immunity from suit over the explosion, and the resulting lawsuit was settled in 1973 for $800,000, a resolution that took almost four years to reach.

Today

The armory itself did not have much damage and it is still in operation today. The old landfill still lurks below ground, but the land above it went on to become a shopping center, a source of gas converted to electricity, and even a driving range. 

Even today, over fifty years later, as we drive past the armory, it’s worth pausing to remember what happened there on that fateful day.