1980 Titan II Missile Crisis in Damascus, Arkansas
Introduction
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Backstory and Context
Text-to-speech Audio
Demascus, Arkansas is a town with a population of only 382 people. However, the 1980s brought the small town of Demascus into the news as this was one of the locations that the government had chosen to serve as the location for one of the fifty-four missile silos that were placed within three states across the United States to house the missiles for the Titan II Missile Program. The Titan Missile Program was a direct response to the Soviet Union’s first thermonuclear bomb detonating in 1953.
The 1980 explosion was not the first time there was an accident at the Damascus Silo. Just two years earlier on January 27, 1978 an oxidizer leak released a cloud of fumes 3,000 feet long, 300 feet wide and 100 feet high to drift across US Highway 65. On September 18, 1980 while performing maintenance on the Titan I missile, the airman dripped his socket wrench which fell about eighty feed and pierced the rocket’s first stage fuel tank. The entire area was evacuated with Senior Airman David Livingston and Sergeant Jeff F. Kennedy returning the following day to get readings on the fuel concentration levels, they went to sit down on the sidewalk so that they could wait for instructions as to what they needed to do next. As soon as they sat down, the missile silo exploded leaving Kennedy with a broken leg and Livingston having fatal injuries that he would succumb to later that day. According to Tom Mahr who was the information of the Strategic air command said that there was a total of twenty-two people who were injured during the explosion with eighteen of those injured having to have been hospitalized.
The cleanup at the site of the explosion was one that would require the removal of several tons of debris withing 400 acres. It would have cost them $225,322,670 to rebuild the site or $20,000,000 to do a cleanup of the site and seal it off. Titan II’s missile silo was not rebuilt Demascus and was sealed with soil, gravel and small concrete debris.
Sources
https://iowacoldcases.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/1980-9-19-crg-burkert-atkison-2pgs.pdf
https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/titan-ii-missile-explosion-2543/
https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/titan-ii-icbm-launch-complex-sites-7760/
https://titanmissilemuseum.org/about/