Command and Control

During the early-morning leak in 1978, Anglin had evacuated Damascus residents who lived in the path of the oxidizer. The experience had left him frustrated with the Air Force. At first the Air Force didn’t know what was happening — and then it didn’t want to tell him. Again and again, he was assured that the reddish brown cloud posed no serious threat. He and one of his deputies inhaled a fair amount of oxidizer while escorting people out of their homes. It made both of them sick. After Anglin got the dry heaves and vomited in the road, the two were airlifted by helicopter to the hospital at Little Rock Air Force Base. They were given a clean bill of health and released within a few hours. But Anglin got headaches and didn’t feel right for weeks. Now a column of what looked like white smoke rose into the sky from the same missile complex. Once again, nobody from the Air Force had bothered to give him a call.

King said hello to the sheriff and the state trooper. Let’s go down there and see what’s going on, Anglin suggested. The four men walked down the access road, wondering what was wrong this time, as the evening light grew dim. They reached the perimeter fence and stopped for a second. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, a couple of Air Force security officers appeared with M-16 rifles and asked what they were doing there.

“I’m the sheriff of the county,” Anglin said. “And it looks like you’ve got another problem. We’re just trying to figure out what we need to do. Do we need to evacuate people?”

“No, no, we’ve got everything under control,” one of the security officers replied. The command post at Little Rock was on top of the situation.

Anglin and the state trooper turned around and started walking back toward the highway. The sheriff did not look pleased. King started firing questions at the security officers: What exactly is the problem? Is that smoke? Is there a fire? One of the officers was about to answer, then asked King and Phillips if they worked for the sheriff’s department. When King said no, we’re with KGFL, the officer’s response was blunt: “Sir, get your ass out of here.”

The two young men laughed as they returned to their car. “Boy, he wasn’t in too good a mood,” Phillips said. They decided to stick around for a while, alongside the highway, and see what happened next. But first they had to get a message to the station. The transmitter on the Omni wasn’t strong enough to send a signal over the nearby hill on Highway 65, so they drove to the top of it. King asked the technician at the station to contact the Associated Press and KATV, the ABC affiliate in Little Rock. Tell them something’s wrong at the Titan II complex in Damascus, King said. Then they drove down the hill, parked near the access road, and waited.

* * *

Childers and Holder took turns at the console where the commander normally sat. Mazzaro stood at the other console or paced back and forth in the room. He was one of the finest missile combat crew commanders that either of them had met, but now he seemed distracted. Every few minutes, one of them would push the HAZARD ALERT LOGIC RESET button. It was supposed to turn off any warning lights that were malfunctioning, that were signaling a nonexistent problem. Not long after Powell admitted to having dropped the socket, the RESET button was pushed, and the OXI VAPOR LAUNCH DUCT light went out. That confirmed what Childers and Holder already suspected: there was no oxidizer leak. At least one potential hazard could be ruled out. They knew that the stage 1 fuel tank was leaking and that fuel vapors were filling the silo. But was there really a fire?

Holder thought that once the tank was pierced, fuel vapors began to interact with the oxidized aluminum panels in the silo. He didn’t think there was a roaring fire. It was more likely a smoldering one, hot enough to set off the fire detectors. The PTS crew topside had given conflicting accounts of the cloud leaving the exhaust vent, at first describing it as white, later as “green smoke.” Childers thought there was a fuel leak, pure and simple, that had somehow registered as a fire. Fuel vapors were easily mistaken for smoke. He couldn’t explain, however, why the fire detectors had been triggered. They were mechanical devices containing a sliver of metal that melted at 140 degrees. They should be reliable. Perhaps the hazard warning circuitry had malfunctioned, signaling that the detectors had been triggered when they hadn’t. In any event, the sprays in the silo would help. Water would dilute the fuel, making it less flammable and explosive. And if there was a smoldering fire, the water would extinguish it.