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I felt like I was in a war zone with the explosions, the smell of smoke, uh the smell of burning flesh, people
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screaming. >> It was the single most deadly automobile accident in American history. 99
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vehicles, most of them destroyed. 12 people died. >> Identifiable more than 50 were injured.
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>> Total destruction. >> If I hadn't been there and and I witnessed it, I don't believe I could
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have believed. >> The accident happened along a three-mile stretch of highway long known for dense,
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thick fog. But what was causing the fog? The victims and their families wanted answers.
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[Music] [Music] [Applause] The accident occurred on Interstate 75 in Tennessee on a portion of highway
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between Chattanooga and Knoxville. The highway was constructed through a valley which lies between the Cumberland
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and Great Smoky Mountains. From the time the highway first opened back in 1973, there had been numerous multi-vehicle
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chain reaction accidents in the same three-mile section. The first occurred just 4 months after
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the highway opened. Three people died in a 17c car pileup. 10 were injured. Just one month later, there was a
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ninecar accident. Although there were no deaths, nine were injured. During the first 6 years the highway was
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open, there was an average of one multi-car accident each year. One of the largest was in November of
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1978, involving more than 60 vehicles. Six people were killed. nearly 100 injured.
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All of the accidents had one thing in common, the sudden appearance of a dense, thick fog, reducing visibility to
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near zero. Tennessee State Highway officials responded by installing fog warning lights to warn drivers when fog
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was in the area. Highway patrol officers were posted to stand watch every morning
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along the fogprone area to make sure drivers slowed down when the fog warning lights were activated.
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The combination of these two systems worked. For 11 years, there were no major accidents along the fog-prone
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stretch of Interstate 75. But all of that changed on December 11th, 1990. >> It's a massive wreck. Everybody's
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bumping into everybody. >> I've had several reports I've had an explosion in that area, and they're
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still piling up. As I rolled down the window, I could hear the cars just crashing into each other one after
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another. >> A motor home hit the front end of my truck after just seconds after I had
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gotten out. And then vehicle started hitting the back of it. I'll never forget hearing one. He hit other cars
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and just knocked them out of the way like there were nothing and came and crashed just to the right of that motor
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home. The explosion was such that it almost knocked me down. Mike Curtis pulled this 14-year-old boy
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out of the motor home, then rescued the boy's mother. >> And I turned and went back to get her
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husband. All I could see was fire. I could smell hair burning. His coat came off burning in my hands.
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[Music] It's probably the hardest thing I've ever had to witness. The most helpless feeling I've ever had.
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[Music] The man burned to death. 12 people were killed, 56 others injured, making it the largest vehicular
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accident in American history. These pictures were taken shortly after the accident when most of the fog had
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dissipated. The vehicles that I saw, I don't even know if you could classify
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them as vehicles. What normally was a pickup truck was 3 foot in length, body still in it.
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>> After 11 years without a serious accident, the killer fog had struck again.
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But why? The families of the dead and injured demanded answers. They wanted to know what caused the dense thick fog on
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December 11th, 1990. [Music] On December 11th, 1990, 30-year-old Craig Piper was driving his
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tractor trailer south on Interstate 75 on his way to visit his mother for the holidays.
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[Music] When he entered the thick, dense fog, visibility was near zero. Within seconds, he crashed.
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[Music] The flames were extremely intense and I knew there wasn't any way I could get
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him out. And I had to stand there and watch this man burn uh in his vehicle. There wasn't really anything I could do.
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Flames were too big. I didn't have a fire extinguisher. I just had to stand there and watch this this this man burn
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alive. >> Craig Piper's mother wanted answers and hired attorney Doug Fees, who was not
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only a lawyer, but also an engineer. She wanted Feast to find out what caused the
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terrible fog that was responsible for her son's death. >> She said the the two people in that car
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were killed and that her son had been burned alive in his tractor trailer and was wondering if there was anything that
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I could do to help her. The accident occurred along Interstate 75 at its lowest point in the valley
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about a half mile from where the interstate crosses the Hawaias River. Because of its location, fog has always
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been common in this area. Fog is basically a cloud which forms on the ground. Fog occurs when there is too
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much water in the air for the atmosphere to absorb. Since cooler air holds less moisture than warm air and cool air
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gathers in lowlying areas, the valley through which Interstate 75 passes is perfect for the formation of natural
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fog. But the fog described by the accident victims was extremely thick and dense.
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Was the fog on the day of the accident naturally produced or was it caused by one or more of the local industries
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nearby? >> On those three days there there was some amount of river fog uh although it was
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relatively small. Uh on all three days there was a very noticeable uh emission of fog related uh water vapor uh from
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the uh from the Bowwater facility. The Bowwater Paper Company is located 3 miles to the east of the Interstate
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Highway. It is the largest producer of newsprint in North America and releases large quantities of water vapor into the
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atmosphere 24 hours a day as part of the manufacturing process. Wayne Davis recommended that the state of Tennessee
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conduct a more detailed study in order to understand the cause of the fogging conditions. The state decided not to
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fund a more detailed study, but elected to install a fog warning system along the highway and posted state troopers to
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patrol the fog-prone stretch of highway each and every morning. For 11 years, the system worked. Between 1979 and
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1990, there were no serious multi-vehicle accidents along the 3m stretch of Interstate 75. The system
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worked until December 11th, 1990. The Wayne Davis study was an important starting point for Doug Fees. But the
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Davis study was conducted 12 years earlier. Fees needed to know what caused the fog on December 11th, 1990.
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>> Doug Fees heard about a scientist who was using computers to track weather
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conditions and pollutants. Was it possible that science could recreate the weather condition on the
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day of the accident? Attorney Doug Fees wanted to know if the thick dense fog on the morning of the
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accident had been produced naturally or was caused by one or more of the local industries or some combination of both.
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To find out, he hired Dr. Alan Eschinrotor who teaches civil engineering at Harvard University. His
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area of expertise is risk management and he also runs a consulting firm which specializes in air quality modeling.
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Eshenroer gathered weather information about the morning of the accident from the Knoxville and Chattanooga airports
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as well as from two nuclear power plants, one only 18 miles from the scene. Weather records indicated that
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there were few if any clouds on the morning of the accident. Winds were light and the temperature dropped
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rapidly the night before from a high of 60° in the afternoon to almost freezing.
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This 30° drop in temperature could cause a weather phenomenon called an inversion. An inversion occurs when the
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temperature on the ground is cooler than the temperature in the atmosphere. This
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prevents air and moisture from dissipating into the atmosphere, pushing the moisture back towards the ground.
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Very early on the morning of the accident, a helicopter pilot flying over Interstate 75 noticed a mushroomshaped
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cloud similar to this one over the Bowwater paper mill smoke stacks 3 mi east of the accident site. Echinroder
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believes this was visual confirmation of the inversion. Water vapor is produced naturally coming from evaporation from
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lakes, streams, rivers and ground moisture. Dr. Esshinroer calculated that the evaporation rate of the natural
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bodies of water in the area was only 392 gall per day. This was barely enough to
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create even a light fog, let alone the dense, thick fog described by accident victims and rescue personnel. Echinrotor
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was convinced there had to be another source of water vapor which caused the thick fog. He noticed a series of ponds
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which straddled the interstate highway on two sides. These were wastewater treatment ponds which belonged to the
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Bowwater paper plant. These ponds were used to clean the industrial waste water from the paper mill. In two of the
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ponds, air raator fans would propel the water up into the air. Most of the water
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dropped back into the ponds. Some of it did not. >> That's called drift. Drift droplets are
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things that drift away from the site of where they are formed. All the other droplets fall back to earth or fall back
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to the pond where they originate. So we had to do some original calculations in an engineering estimate fashion for
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emission of those droplets. >> Rotor calculated that these wastewater treatment ponds added 10 million gallons
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of water vapor into the atmosphere in the 24 hours preceding the accident. far more than the 392 gall from the natural
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bodies of water. At the paper plant itself, an additional 1.5 million gallons of water vapor was being
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released each day from the smoke stacks. But it wasn't just water vapor that was
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being released from these smoke stacks. Paper plants released what are called particullet as waste from the paper
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production process. Particulates are microscopic particles which become surfaces on which water vapor can
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condense and this leads to fog. You not only had the fog potential from the presence of the water vapor, but you had
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a place for it to form in the surfaces of these microparticles, these condensation nuclei. But how could
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Echinrotor tell if the water vapor from the Bowwater paper plant 3 miles away caused the fog on the interstate highway
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on the day of the accident? He found part of the answer on this aerial videotape shot by a local videographer a
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few hours after the accident. Echinroer recognized the wind pattern as a drainage flow which carries cooler air
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down into the valley. But Eschinroer needed to know in which direction the drainage flow was heading. To do that,
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he needed to know the exact position of the airplane. Using navigational charts,
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calculating the position of the sun from the glint angle off the wing and ground
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references, he identified the plane's position relative to the paper mill and
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the accident site. The videotape convinced Ashen Rotor that the drainage flow wind pattern was headed west from
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the location of the paper mill towards the accident site. >> As to the cause of that accident that
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day, there's no doubt in my mind that the industrial fog created by water emissions from that bowwater paper mill
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was a major factor, the major factor, preponderantly major factor in forming the fog that caused the accident.
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Attorney Doug Fees now had scientific evidence and proceeded with the civil suit he filed earlier against the
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Bowwater Paper Company and the state of Tennessee. As Mike Curtis drove onto Interstate 75
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on the morning of the accident, the sun was so strong he took his jacket off in the car. When Curtis approached the fog
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zone, the fog warning lights in one direction weren't working, and those in the other direction had been blinking
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continuously for 3 days and were ignored. The daily police fog patrols had been abandoned years earlier. Once in the
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thick fog, visibility was near zero. Mike Curtis never saw what he hit. Curtis heard crashes, people crying for
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help, the explosions. >> I knelt down and asked God to help me to get through it.
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>> He helped a young boy caught inside a motor home. >> Uh 12 or 13 year old boy that I got out.
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His mother was inside screaming. The adrenaline was pumping and I ripped the window out and got her out. After saving
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the boy and his mother, Curtis tried to save the father, but he burned to death.
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There was also tragedy for a woman driving with her granddaughter. This is all that was left of the car.
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This car was smashed completely flat like an accordion. >> The car was compacted down to something
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in the neighborhood of 30 in long. By some miracle, this little girl lived through the entire thing.
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>> The grandmother died. Randall McKeon and his two children also suffered a loss that day. They lost a
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wife and mother when Judith McKon burned to death in the accident. There wasn't
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no body. She was over 90% gone. It was like she had been cremated and uh there wasn't nothing to view. She
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still had remains, ashes, which I'm not saying could be identified, but still knowing that she died in that
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vehicle, I uh did the best I could to get everything of all the ashes out and I spread them
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across that field right out there. And uh I I just I guess that was uh the only thing I knew to do.
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Doug Fee's case was set for trial in 1994, more than 3 years after the accident. Bowwater disagreed with the
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scientific calculations used in the Echinrotor study and hired its own scientific expert. Dr. George Mciel is a
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meteorologist from Denver. His study concluded that Bowwater's contribution to the fog on the day of the accident
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was less than 1%. Our conclusion was that the fog formed by a natural process due to mixing of moist air at different
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altitudes at about 9:00 on the morning of December 11th after the sun had come up and heated the ground enough to start
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the mixing process. And that in in a very abbreviated and simplified form is what caused the fog on that morning.
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>> But shortly before the trial, the courts ordered Bowwater to release a study. it
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commissioned in 1979 from its own consulting firm environmental research and technology.
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In it, ERT states that preliminary evidence suggests that bowwater operations contribute to local vapor
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flux and fogging problems in the Calhoun area. Doug Fees never got the chance to
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prove his case in court. Before the trial, the state of Tennessee reached an outofc court settlement with
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fees on behalf of the families he represented. Because of the malfunctioning fog warning system, the
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state settled for $800,000 and also agreed to install a $4 million computerized fog detection system. When
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the fog reaches a certain density, large signs automatically notify drivers of fog in the area and sensors trigger
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gates on key entrance ramps closing access to the highway. Bowwater also settled out of court with
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30 victims and families represented by Doug fees and other attorneys for $1 million. Bowwater continues to maintain
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that the paper mill and treatment ponds had nothing to do with the fog on the day of the accident. However, Bowwater
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agreed to limit its use of treatment pond number four, which sits near the highway.
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>> But the issue isn't whether or not pond 4 is a contributor to fog, whether
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natural water conditions that are in the community are contributors to fog. The real point is that fog exists in that
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particular place from time to time. It's natural fog and the traffic control
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mechanisms on the highway have to be sufficient to warn motorists. >> Despite the settlement and the new fog
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warning system, many still believe the highway is unsafe. >> Warnings are never the answer when you
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can do better. closure of pond 4 is not enough to to solve the problem. The chance
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of this happening again has been substantially reduced, but the risk has not been eliminated,
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nor has the hazard been eliminated. >> This is only the third time I've been
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here. It's uh and any officer would tell you that, you know, this is a to me it's a
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memorial site. That bridge is a memorial cuz a lot of people died here. Needlessly
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[Music] [Music] [Applause] Good morning. [Music]