The Meldrim Picnic Disaster of 1959 | Episode 74

It's picnic season. And if you thought ants were the most annoying uninvited guests that you could face while have we got a story for you. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we learn why Georgia and Australia are basically the same thing. We'll learn why American freight and commuter trains make so many unscheduled stops, and we'll describe a situation where stop, drop and roll loses all meaning. And if you were listening to this on Patreon, you would get to hear about two extra disasters, including the deadliest case of mass curiosity in the United States history. You would also learn the real reason why our feet turned into molasses in our nightmares, and you'd hear the tale of one man who has to be bound and drugged just to keep them from jumping out of windows every night. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even in mixed company, But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life. Our work is done. So with all that said, show the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. Pack your peach bib, your favorite picannic basket, and media lawn chair for the airport we are heading to Georgia. I said pack a lawnchair because of this time back around COVID when I was going to be traveling through Pearson International Airport in Toronto, which, if your accounting, is the worst airport in Canada. The lines for security at the time were said to be about five hours long. So I actually phoned the airport to ask if it was cool if I just brought a lawn chair that I could sit in as I made my way through the airport and then maybe just abandon it at the gate before boarding. You know what they said. They said, Hey, no one else is doing it, and that's absolutely fine, go ahead. I guess I couldn't foresee a future where I would go on to make a podcast where I would encourage tens and thousands of my listeners to take lawn and folding chairs to the airport and then jam up their boarding gates like it was the French Revolution or something. Now, they said it was absolutely fine, and it was the best investment my knees and lower back ever made. And I only bring it up today because we're going to be flying into Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Now. The reason Pearson stinks is because it's mismanaged all the hell. But Hartsfield Jackson, oh no, if you don't know anything about it, let's start with this. Georgia as a state is home to some of the world's largest corporations. Its biggest aquarium houses the world's largest shark, and their airport is the busiest airport on the planet. They had almost one hundred and five million travelers last year. That's two hundred and eighty six thousand, five hundred and seventy five people passing through that airport every single day. You know that story where Elon Musk wanted to have a hyperloop running under Las Vegas, but the plans got scrapped and instead he kind of created this endless congo line of Tesla's driving underground. Well, if Hartsfield Jackson was a Dodge caravan terminal, then more than forty one thousand of them would be pulling up to the departure gates every single day. That's what, just twenty eight of them every minute. And I don't mind telling you that it wasn't like this back in seventeen seventy three. Seventeen seventy three was an age that predated electricity and photography. And back then, a man named James Oglethorpe and a group of investors got together and asked King George of England for permission to pull off a colossal social experiment. They wanted to take English citizens who were imprisoned for debt and take them out of prison, put them on ships, send them to the New World, and get them to live in a new colony to pound rocks. I'm only kidding. He just wanted them doing colonists stuff, you know, farming and whatever. The plan will become the thirteenth of the Thirteen Colonies, which, if you're not familiar with the term, it's what they describe America's first settlement. It's where all the first Europeans came and spackled themselves across the eastern seaboard of what will become America. It was, in effect America one point zero, and it was a long time ago. Thirteen colonies predated the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the formation of the United States government, running water, and anesthesia. And he didn't have any weird plans. He wasn't trying to make seventeen hundred soil and green out of people. He just wanted to decrease the prison population and give thousands of financial reprobates a new lease on life. And King George said yeah, all right, and gave it his royal stamp of approval. But as listener of the show, Kanye West once said, King George didn't give USh about poor people any more than George Bush cared about black people. And he said this because Kanye knew that the only reason that King George said yes in the first place was because A they'd probably name it after him if he just asked, and B right below Georgia is Florida, and at the time, Florida was kind of overrun with Spaniards and King George didn't much care for them, and so he had it in the back of his head that if Florida ever got itchy, he could order the people of Georgia to go and stomp them out. Loclethorpe, on the other hand, had all these ideas about creating a kind of utopia, a place without booze or slavery and where people farm the land, and that silkworms from the New World were going to make him unbelievably rich back in Europe, or at least that's what he had in his mind. See, none of that actually worked out, and when King George got word, he basically smoked their charter and turned Georgia into just a basic, regular old royal colony, which when you look at it side by side, basically means that Georgia in America was literally the dry run for England's future penal colony experiment in Australia. In other words, Georgia is Australia's spiritual godfather. Plenty of people have tried to create utopia like oasis throughout history, but no one had ever done it on such an elaborate or expensive scale. And like we said, it tanked, it bombed. Oglethorpe blew it. And basically, if you ever feel like you are not great at your job, chin up in fact, and I'm seriously not going to dwell on any of this but as you do fast forward through the years, Georgia takes a couple of grim turns. Even by historical standards. You got your dead Native Americans, your slavery, you got a civil war in there, and then on going civil rights issues. But thankfully, of all the awful things that are going to happen in this story today, none of that plays into any of it. No, on today's story, we are going to a picnic. I swear a community church style picnic. At that, I mean, what's the worst that could ever happen at a picnic? I mean, sure you might get the occasional b and maybe some ants just made off with the couscous, But picnics are thought of as the very epitome of innocent pastoral delight. Sounds pretty ponce And people think that the word picnic probably comes from the French from piquet, meaning to pick at, and nique, which means not much. And there's a character in a sixteen forty nine play called and this will be my best French here, Les charmont effect de barracad u la mattee durabil de la campaignier de frere baqique de picnic and the Lee character's name is picnic. The story goes he got hammered on food and booze during this big insurrection against the French government, and people think that the name just kind of stuck. After that, it came to actually refer to a large meal enjoyed at someone else's expense. From there, picnicking morphed into a kind of a dinner where each invitee brings their own dish to share, pretty much like a pot luck, but it was held indoors, off the ground, with no blanket and no basket, and you had to be an aristocrat in order to participate. Well after about seventeen thousand freshly locked off skulls found their way to the ground during the Reign of Terror, picnicking lost most of its pomp and flare and the musicians and the choreograph dancing, and it really became much simpler, much cleaner, really more of an excuse to just enjoy some time outdoors in the countryside. Speaking of in the year two thousand, about twenty thousand people packed into New York City's Central Park with their baskets and their blankets to set the world record for the world world's biggest outdoor picnic. But then just seven years later, pretty much out of spite, twenty two thousand people came out to the Park de la Bella Vista in Lisbon, Portugal to crap on that accomplishment and replace the record. Which is interesting and petty, But if you're looking for great picnic world records, I think you got to give that one to Memphis in Tennessee, in tom Lee Park, they have got a picnic table thirteen hundred feet long. Try to imagine asking someone to pass something down a table eighty one dodge caravans long, and why would they have this? Well, when I looked up the easiest world record to beat, it's apparently the most socks that you can put on one foot in thirty seconds. And you're probably saying, all right, yes, we know you do love tangents, but what could that possibly have to do with picnic tables. Well, nothing. It simply demonstrates that world records are stupid. But we are not here to set a world record today, or to lop anyone head off for that matter. No, we are visiting a small town in Georgia less than twenty miles or thirty kilometers outside of the capital of Savannah Meldrum, Georgia. To be exact, it's a quiet little community located in the southeast of the state. People say it's a good place to live and a great place to grow up, but also a good place if you like laying low and just avoiding drama. In the last, however, many years, the most excitement that it has seen involves some stolen street signs, a couple of stolen watermelons, and something called a phantom pecan picker. And I will say from experience that it is true that townies and city slickers really like to side eye people suspiciously and have a real get off my lawn energy for their neighbors. But not in a small town. We're talking about a population of less than five hundred. This is the kind of close knit community where everybody knows everyone else. It's the kind of place where you leave your doors unlocked at night and you can put unguarded apple pies on your window to cool with. Would a thought, One resident said, the best people that you will ever meet in your life live right here. We're all like family, and if something happened to one person here, it happens to everybody. There's nothing ominous about that at all. Just remember that I said it. Now. One thing Meldrum is known for is that it has its roots in agriculture and farming. You can farm just about anything in these parts of the state. Cotton, peanuts, timber, watermelons, peaches, pecans, even sweet delicious foodahlia onions. And as luck would have it, Meldrum sits on a rail line. We all grew up hearing about people being born on the wrong side of the tracks, and there's always this idea that you live too close to a rail line, and it gives people a kind of a oh reaction. But not back then. Hell no, for most of American history, a homeowner would brag about living near a rail line the way that say, oh, I don't know your dick. Neighbor across the street brags about his fifty five foot house with a helipad on the roof. No, for most of the twentieth century, if you had access to a rail line, you had access to the whole world. And for the people of Meldrum, the railway provided the best way to keep goods moving and make room for more crops. I mean, it wasn't a Silicon Valley operation. Here, but it kept the people happy and fed enough so that most residents could probably hand draw the Seaboard Airline railroad logo from memory. It connected towns like this to major cities like Richmond in Virginia, or Rally in North Carolina, or even Tampa in Florida. And yeah, I said it was an airline, which is confusing because obviously trains have nothing to do with lying. It's kind of their way of saying that trains drive as straight as an arrow, and that they are the fastest and most direct way to travel. So why have we come all the way to Meldrum, Georgia. Well, I did say something about a picnic. And the date of our story today is Sunday, June the twenty eighth, nineteen fifty nine. It was a beautiful, warm and sunny summer day, while hot and muggy. Really, I mean it was ninety eight degrees or thirty seven celsius out, which to me says, hey, no better day to grab your family and head down the Sandy Woods Road for an afternoon on the banks of the Ogeechee River for a little relief. It's a free flowing river, no dams, no jet skis just a natural, quiet, meandering blackwater river lined with moss straight trees, and not far away, only a few miles out of town, there was a natural bend in the river with a nice sandy bank that acted like a beach, the perfect place for a picnic or a swim. And if it was me, I would have tried to keep it a secret, but again, it was a small town, so they went ahead and built a little family picnic area and a clubhouse on the site. And as long as you knew how to swim, and hell, even if you didn't, you'd no doubt been there. The Meldrum Baptist Church throws their annual picnic a chance for the flock to feel a little fellowship, grab a little home cook food, and definitely cool their feet and other unmentionables in the Ogeechee River. Community picnics like this are just one of the ways that community picnics like this are just one of the ways that small towns and especially communities in the South, maintain and strengthen their bonds. Like we said, good food, good people, some outdoor games, you know, maybe even do a little worshiping, you know, sing a hym or two picture a sun drenched August afternoon where the air is warm and filled with the sound of laughter and chatter, and the riverside was alive with activity as about one hundred townsfolk gathered to take part. Families and friends spread out across checker blankets, sharing baskets brimming with homemade pies, fresh fruits, and cold lemonade. I mean, you name it. The scent of fresh grilled sausages and corn on the cob wafted through the air and mingled with the earthy aroma of the river. It was about as idyllic of a painting of traditional Americana as you can imagine. That was until the soft squeal in the distance announced the arrival of the Seaboard Airline freight train number eighty two, which wasn't a surprise. People expected it. See where they were at that part of the river, there was a train trestle bridge that passed overhead, which provided a bit of a show every now and then. The bridge was two thousand, three hundred and thirty seven feet long and was supported by closely spaced wooden legs. It was a trestle bridge. You know, if you saw a photo of one you'd say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, trestle bridge. They were super popular back then because they're reasonably easy to build without the need for any kind of fancy, big city engineering degree, and there were a lot of them. At the time. There were over two hundred thousand miles or three hundred and twenty thousand kilometers of train tracks crisscrossing the country, which is not bad considering the country is only twenty eight hundred miles or forty five hundred kilometers from coast to coast and sixteen hundred and fifty miles or twenty six hundred and fifty five kilometers from top to bottom. That is a lot of rail and it all has to go somewhere, and melt Drum was lucky enough at America's ever expanding spiderweb of rail passed through their town. Children waded into the cool river, splashing and playing in the enormous shadow of the bridge. As the train approached, everything was perfectly normal. The bridge towered about twenty five to thirty feet above the river, and it shook and its chimmy as the freight train passed over. It was about three forty in the afternoon, and the bridge gently creaked and vibrated under the weight, which again no problem. The most ordinary thing in the world. Train number eighty two had three diesel electric locomotives and pulled one hundred and twenty three cars. Followed up with a caboose. But around the time that the majority of cars had already passed on, something changed. These kind of bridges use a kind of lattice structure to support the incredible weight that a train throws onto it, and the families playing and squealing in the water below would have had a hard time hearing the groaning and creaking of the wooden supports as the train high above started to let's say, run a little less smoothly. As the weight of tankers began to pass over the bridge, the bridge began to buckle and these tankers began to bunch everything between the one hundred and seventh and the one hundred and twenty second car be began to tumble off their perch and fall off the track. And when moments later a coupling on a car near the end of the train broke with a powerful snap, nothing on earth could have prevented the cars from plummeting off of the bridge. The incredibly named seventeen year old C. R. Saturday Junior was playing on the sandbar with his friends when he first saw pieces of the trestle falling into the water. They couldn't even move their eyes away from what they were seeing unfolding before them. Railcars were leaving the bridge and tumbling piling up in the river below. And say, you ever hear of buttane? It's this colorless, flammable gas that vaporizes at room temperature. And what else can I say? It's pretty flammable stuff. They mostly use it for things like cigarette lighters and propellants, portable stove fuel, heating fuel, even some refrigerants. And it's pretty close to propane, except propane can handle much lower temperatures, so buttane is thought of as more of an indoor kind of a gas. Of course, you spend too much time marinating in the stuff, and you're gonna probably swoon and barf and pass out in that order. And yeah, to your original point, I do like a lot of tangents in my storytelling. But why are we talking about buttane? Oh right, Yeah, So those cars landing in the river, well, the last few of them that left the tracks were filled with butane. They were tanker cars, and what did they do when they arrived at the bottom of the bridge. Well, one remained intact, so that's good, but the other one ruptured on impact and sent a miss of butane gas spreading everywhere. They transport these things under pressure, basically squishing them from a gas down into a liquid. This helps them pack a lot more into every car to help save on costs. But rip that canister open and that liquid is going to depressurize into a much much larger cloud of vapor. One man knew exactly what to do the moment he recognized the leak for what it was. He grabbed his pregnant wife by the arm and ran her into the water, and from there they swam out to the middle of the river where it's deepest, and they just let the current carry them away from the scene, which they would later say saved their lives. And most people, like Saturday Junior there didn't even realize the danger that they were in. They were drawn in and paralyzed by their natural curiosity. But you know what they say about curiosity and expected lifespan. So I mentioned how bad butane could be, but I forgot to mention that it was also carrying gasoline and liquefied petroleum gas, and one newspaper described what happened next like this. The gas from the cars unfolded its prey like tentacles of a giant octopus, before erupting into a flaming roar that struck them down even as they fled, and there was nowhere to flee too. There was nowhere to escape. The gas had spread over the river and the surrounding area like a ground fog. Two men on the train ran to the caboose and were screaming for people to run for it. It was only a matter of time before the fumes or vapors or liquid itself had found a cigarette or a hot car engine, and when it did, the gas flashed into flame, resulting in a tremendous explosion. Well two actually, The first explosion ignited the second car of bututine, which was loaded with another ten thousand gallons of this stuff. And I tried doing the math, and as near as I could tell, the explosion would have been the equivalent of about two hundred and fifty tons of TNT, which was more than one hundred times more powerful than the Oklahoma City bombing but I'm thinking my math is really off this time. I can confidently tell you that buttane burns about thirty six six hundred fahrenheit or a two thousand degrees celsius, which means that I could cook the pizza in my freezer in my oven at four twenty five for fifteen minutes, or theoretically an abutane explosion for considerably less than a minute. Of course, the pizza would then be rendered poisonous and a lot more charred than I'm used to. The impact of the pressure wave of the double blast wrecked the other cars that were laying on the river banks, and within moments all that oil covering the river's surface ignited. Flames roared over people in the water and on the river banks as it became a raging inferno. Jesus himself would have covered his eyes. Picnickers, who had just minutes before been enjoying a beautiful and wholesome day, were caught completely off guard and had no time to react. The scene was chaotic and terrifying. Panic broke out as people tried to escape the intense heat and the deadly fire. Some tried to escape the heat by jumping into the water, only to find themselves immediately engulfed as the oil spread, and a lot more risked their lives to save others by pulling them from the burning river or guiding them to safety, which is absolutely incredible considering how difficult it is to reach survivors when it's that hot. When you think about it, most people consider fifty degrees or one hundred and twenty two fahrenheit to be the upper limit for prolonged exposure to ambient heat without any kind of protection before you're on the ground babbling about heat stroke. While the radiant heat from a normal fire can pass seventy degrees or one hundred and fifty eight fahrenheit, pretty much forces you to move away within seconds, and anything over one hundred degrees or two hundred and twelve fahrenheit is hot enough to boil water and burn skin on contact. A man named Hodges and about fifteen other people were trying to run out of the river. But you ever try running in waste deep water with a thirty foot tall wall of flames bearing down on you. This is the stuff of nightmares. When the river ignited behind them, the fire was as tall as the trees. It was a wall of flames, and people knew that they would be safe if they could just outrun the gas. It was like this terrible game of tag where if the fire touches you, you die. Actually, if the heat from the fire even catches you, you also die. And being not close to an inferno exposes you to a life sucking amount of heat. When I was a kid, in comic books, whenever someone captured Aquaman or the sub Mariner, they would just throw them under a sun lamp to sap all their strength. And it's the exact same thing happening here. We've even talked about this in previous fire episodes, where there's a kind of a formula for how far you want to be away from open flames for your own safety. The best case scenario is that you're at home and the flames are on TV. So you're invited to a riverside picnic on a beautiful day and everything's great until you have to try to catch a twenty million pound train falling on you from above. Would you know what to do well? I wouldn't. I'm just saying most of our safety segments are generally geared towards making you as safe as you can reasonably be in any situation. But I cannot teach you how to meaningfully catch a train. No, this is a highly unusual situation, and I don't really know what to say other than introverts tend to do better in these situations. See, I can't really teach you what to do after you've been squorshed feet first into twenty feet of riverbed. I'm just thinking this now, but there are some situations that are so terrible and unforgiving that the only real lesson or takeaway needs to be that you need to try to make the most of the time that you have in this world. Case in point, Rather than teaching you how to fill out a living will kit, I'm gonna take this time to teach you how to make a picnic treat that you will never forget. Woo old fashioned Southern fried chicken or pulled pork cheesy corn bread poppers. Oooh boy. I don't know what's gonna happen to my accent here, but we are about to have a party in our miles, So grab a pencil. You're gonna need one easiest way to do this. You get two ounces of frozen popcorn, chicken or a cup of fully god barbecue pull pork, one package of corn bread mix, four fresh or pickle jalapeno peppers, one half cup of maple syrup er honey, and one teaspoon of serrachi chili sauce, which is optional. Same with the jalapinos. I guess I mean not for me. Jalapenos are my favorite vegetable, although they've got seeds in them, so actually are they a fruit? I do not know. That is a fair question. The directions are pretty simple. You just preheat your oven too four hundred degrees, cook and cut up the chicken or the barbecue pule pork. Prepare the corn bread mix and place a doll up into foiline mini muffin cups. You're gonna fill each cup with about a tablespoon of corn bread batter, and then you're gonna add some kalipino in a piece of the chicken or pulled pork de bening which you prefer, and bake for about twelve minutes until golden brown, but before when they're not quite done yet, take out the muffin tray and spread a little cheese on the top of each and finish cooking. Serve it with maple syrup er honey, and try whisking in some of that serracha into the sauce. What I've just told you you may not save your life, but it may turn you into a hero. Nonetheless, I mentioned off the top out Georgia had a bit of a negative time with race issues, and it was hardly only Georgia. Let's make that very clear. And let me also make it clear that when you hear things like that, you have no idea what relationships were like between ordinary people. You only hear the worst of the worst. Here's a case in point. There was a man who lived really close nearby. His name was Hayes, and obviously he heard the explosion, and when he came outside, he found a handful of young black men piling mattresses into the back of a pickup truck to take down to the river. And why mattresses, because they wanted something that they could use as a gurney to ferry the hurt and the dying to the road for a trip to the hospital. They even had the thought to bring first aid and bandages and were helping apply first aid. And mister Hayes said he had never seen these boys before. He had no idea who they were, and it didn't matter. They knew people were suffering, and they leapt in to help, no questions asked. Mister Hayes said that these were heroes, true heroes, running blindly into this horrific scene with no idea who or what they were going to find, and they risked their own safety to do it. Two of the people that they carried out on the mattresses did eventually die, but the better point is others lived, and that would not have been possible without their selflessness. Entire families were completely wiped out that day. For hundreds of yards down either side of the bank of the river, the earth was scorched black from the inferno. A man named lb Slater got to the river about fifteen minutes after hearing the explosion with his father in law, and he couldn't accept that these horrifying scenes were playing out around him in his own hometown and not on the beach of some foreign war zone. They were in more than shop, They were in disbelief. They were looking at the impossible. He wanted to run to help, but he immediately came across a black form laying on the ground. It was an older woman and her arm was reaching towards a smaller form. It was her grandson. They may not have been able to recognize them, but they knew them because everyone knew everyone, and that made the anguish that much worse. The fire engulfed a full five acres, all of it, the trees, the cars, the buildings, all reduced to ash. Fire departments from nearby communities arrived at the scene. Even the National Guard showed up, but the fire burned for hours before it was finally brought under control. The entire community of Meldrum, to a person, was in absolute shock. In the end, almost everyone there that day was injured and twenty three people lost their lives. So what the hell happened? Believe it or not. Nothing. All the equipment, the train, the bridge, all of it was inspected and nothing was found that could have caused or even contributed to the accident. But here's the thing. On the day of the accident, it was hot, and heat makes metal expand, and the high temperatures likely caused the rails to expand. In fact, they believed that the rails expanded by as much as seventeen inches in the heat. And the problem was the rails were only anchored at the ends of the track, which means those points stay steady and the rest of it could just do whatever it liked without getting into it. In a nutshell, this would have caused the rails to spread, which would make it impossible for the wheelbase of the train cars to stay on them. And if they couldn't stay on them, they couldn't stay upright. And the thing about this kind of thinking is of course Georgia's kind of hot, which really means if this was the true culprit for the disaster, then it really was just a matter of the wrong train being at the wrong place at the exact wrong time time, and hindsight being twenty twenty. According to officials, it is possible that if guardrails had been used on the bridge, the derailed cars may not have fallen off the trestle. So it wasn't something someone did that led to the disaster, it's what people didn't do that led to it. Many of the railroad bridges across the United States are over a century old. Engineers always said that they were built to stay in the test of time, but engineers also said that the Tesla cyber truck was designed to be an off road vehicle. The bridge was made of wood, and wood rots when it's exposed to moisture, and not all at once. It's more like its structural integrity weakens over time, and with ongoing usage it ages and suffers. The bridge in our story was built a long time ago without considering the weight of modern tanker cars, which are filled with heavy oil. With every day in a new train adding millions of pounds of vertical stress onto it, It's like clubbing an old man in the back of the legs over and over. Eventually something has to give, not that anyone would have known that. See. The biggest issue here is a lack of inspections and maintenance, and reports are that inspections that do happen are pretty rare and fairly lazy. Someone might come out every decade and give it a superficial once over that really doesn't identify critical weaknesses and why money. Even if they did know what necessary repairs or maintenance was needed, never ending budget cuts make that knowledge irrelevant. There are a lot of similarities between this episode and our PG and E episode. The Federal Railroad Administration, or the FRA for short, requires railroads to inspect their bridges annually, but there's no real enforcement and why money Most federal and state funding for rail infrastructure is earmarked for passenger service, So no rules plus no oversight plus budget cuts create unsafe conditions. It's literally the entire plot of OPG and the episode bridge collapses are Rail failures lead to derailments, environmental harm, and loss of life, not to mention the disruption of the supply chain and the erosion of the entire economy. There are more than a thousand derailments across the United States every year, but unless one rolls into a group of churchgoers and explodes, nothing changes. And actually, did anything change after this story? Sadly you already know that answer. In our last episode, no one was made safer afterwards because the information was classified, and in these kinds of disasters, no one is made safer because there's simply no political will to plunk money into rail safety and infrastructure. On February the third, twenty twenty three, a wheel bearing on a Norfolk Southern train failed, and before anyone knew it, the town of East Palestine, Ohio was treated to an all you can eat vinyl chloride party that derailment was hard to ignore, and try as they might to not report on it, it did become a major news story regardless, And since then the FEDS have mandated some new safety equipment and advisories, and man, I hope they find someone to pay for these someday. All I know for sure is remember what I said about living near rail lines. You know who absolutely doesn't live anywhere near them. Congressmen, you know who they do live near lobbyists, So good luck America. There are more than six hundred and seventeen thousand bridges across the United States, and forty two percent of them are at least fifty years old. The best guess right now is that forty six thousand, one hundred and fifty four of them are structurally deficient, which means they are ready to collapse. Except again, no one knows which ones, where or when because no one's checking on them. The Ogeechee River, which was once surrounded by a canopy of mossy branches, now just overhung with charred and brittle tree limbs. The Meltrum community was a close knit place before the disaster, and the ensuing tragedy only served to bring it closer together. Neighbors still look out after each other, but the smell of smoke and the screams and the sight of the blazing river were sights that would be forever etched into the minds of those who survived. And it did take years, but the scorched and charred land did bloom again, and it remains a popular gathering spot even today. The railroad company was held accountable for the faulty bridge, and like any serious rail accident, for a little bit, it shone a light on the need for improved emergency responses and safety measures. But again for a little while. Compensation was given to the families of the victims, but no amount of money could ever replace the lives that were lost that day. When you lose a family member, part of you will die inside. That person who you were right up to the minute for will die and be replaced with a pale, sad photocopy of who you were, and you will spend the rest of your life trying to return to the person you once were. In this town, imagine having to attend six funerals in a single day. The Meldrum train picnic disaster remains one of the deadliest train accidents in US history and the deadliest picnic related disaster of all time.