This story was written by Sharon Klein, Berlin Town Historian and is posted on the Town of Berlin website (http://berlin-ny.us/).
From the time Berlin was established as a town in 1806, we have had our share of disasters and tragedies. From epidemics, blizzards, fires and floods to tornadoes, accidents and draughts, nothing in modern times has equaled the propane truck disaster, which occurred 50 years ago on July 25, 1962.
Nine people died of burns, one of whom was Robert J. McLucas of Pennsylvania, driver of the 7,000 gallon tanker loaded with propane that left the Plank Road at a sharp turn, hit a tree and exploded leaving the area looking like a war zone.
[private]Experts who investigated the accident said the propane spewed from the ruptured tank, mixed with air and formed a cloud that spread rapidly over the area and then exploded.
If you were in Berlin on that day, it is something you will never forget, and something you don’t want to talk about very much. Initially, no one knew what had happened except that it was bad!
Eleven homes and the First Baptist Church burned to the ground. Sheds and barns and garages were razed. Other houses were badly damaged. Cars and school buses were destroyed.
Worse still was the loss of human life – our friends and neighbors. On that fateful day we lost Mrs. Rosalie Loker, Mrs. Victoria Loker, Joseph E. Sourdiffe and his wife, Kenneth McCumber and his wife Florence (“Flossie”), Mary Brazie and Dorothy Moses. Some add Mabel H. Wager to the list as she died in her sleep that night of a heart attack. And, of course, there was the driver of the truck, Robert McLucas. Several others were badly burned.
Not all died immediately; it seemed like each day another wake and/or funeral was added to the list.
It had been a dry summer, which meant the water supply was limited, and the major fire spread rapidly before any apparatus could respond. That meant the principal job of the fire companies was to confine the fire to the area and effect whatever rescues could be made.
No longer can spectators be in the area, hampering the firemen and ambulance folks, as it was that day. Some fires even popped up again the next day.
In the following days, thousands of people visited the site. Some local folks were upset feeling the Town was like a sideshow. However, many put money in milk cans near the area to help victims and families. Others sent money by mail. All told, more than $20,000 as collected in this manner, according to then Town Supervisor, W. Robert Bentley.
We must be grateful that the new Route 22 had been completed a short time before, enabling fire companies and ambulances to get to the scene more quickly. Fire apparatus and ambulances from 13 communities in Rensselaer County and from Dalton and North Adams, Massachusetts, were called upon thanks to the Mutual Aid Response in place at the time. It was reported that traffic was backed up for 7 miles.
We must also be grateful that the propane truck didn’t travel another 30 seconds downhill before the accident for it would have involved the center of town where hundreds of people were in residential buildings, businesses and the hotel.
As a result of this tragedy, the State Police, the Sheriff’s Department, ambulances and fire companies now work together even better than they did then.
It was determined that the cargo tank had a faulty weld causing the explosion. Since then tanks have been redesigned which may well have aided the outcome of the recent propane truck accident in Hoosick.
The area of greatest impact has been rebuilt and is hardly discernible now except to those of us who were here on that day. However, the scars of the families of those whose lives were cut short will always remain.
The Survivors Remember
by David Flint and Bea Peterson
Bob Bentley, now 90 years old, was Town Supervisor when his town was rocked by the fiery disaster. Bentley’s farm was about a mile down Route 22 from the village center. It was a hot day in July, and he was in the barn milking cows. He didn’t hear any explosion, but coming out of the barn at about 5:45 pm he was astonished at how black the sky was. Then fire trucks from Stephentown came speeding by on the highway. Bentley, a Berlin firefighter, hopped in his car and followed the fire trucks.
“Everything was on fire,” he said, “It was hard to believe your eyes. It happened so quick.” He helped put out hose to fight the fires, but it was very frustrating because with all the hydrants in town open there was no pressure from the reservoir. With fire trucks arriving from all over, they began trucking water from the Little Hoosic. Bentley watched the Baptist Church begin to collapse. There was nothing they could do to save it.
If there was any luck that day, Bentley said, it was that at that time of day the kids who would have been out playing in the streets were mostly in their homes having their supper.
Bentley said the fires smoldered all that night. Up at Charlie Miller’s place across from the Lamp Post Inn two or three school buses had been hit, and they burned all night. Nobody got any sleep that night, Bentley said. He finally returned home at 5 am to milk his 20 cows.
As Town Supervisor, Bentley was besieged in the aftermath by all sorts of government officials, insurance agents and news reporters. He also handled calls from all over offering to provide some assistance to survivors. People from the Town of Berlin, Ohio, were eager to help. Milk cans had also been set out around town into which people could drop their donations. About $20,000 was collected in donations. Nobody knew what to do with this money so Bentley formed a committee of Town residents to disperse the funds to needy survivors.
Stephen Riccardi was just 15 when the explosion struck. He remembers he had just finished eating dinner at his parents’ house on Route 22 below the Seagroatt greenhouses and was putting his dishes in the sink. It was about 5:30 pm. He heard the explosion and looking out, what sticks in his mind is, “The whole sky was a ball of fire.” He then watched in horror as the whole thing then dropped down “in big globs of fire.” His first thought was that a jet plane had crashed.
Someone said the whole Town was on fire. Running down toward the village center he observed that the garage across from the Lamp Post Inn was burning. Later, school buses parked there would catch fire, and Riccardi recalls that something that apparently was singed stuffing from the seats rained down onto his parents’ lawn.
Down on Maple Avenue firefighters were dragging hoses between the Baptist and Catholic churches. The Baptist Church was on fire as was the old school building that Frank Jones had converted to apartments. Flames were shooting up from fuel tanks in the ground. The Catholic Church, a brick building, had steam rising from the roof as firemen hosed it down. This building survived, however, and Riccardi believes it may have acted as a buffer and shielded the houses further up Main Street.
Riccardi has horrible memories of seeing some of the residents of the area near the Church wandering around dazed and badly burned. A number of houses were on fire, still intact, but frustrated firemen couldn’t get the water to save them
Following the chaos of that night, things became somewhat more orderly in the following days. High level police officials arrived and cordoned off the burned areas. Riccardi and some of his friends were drafted as “gophers” and permitted to access the restricted areas.
“It was a terrible, terrible thing,” Riccardi said. “Things like that just don’t ever erase from your mind.”
Kent Goodermote, 8 years old, was with his grandparents, Art and Marsha Goodermote, who had a house not far up the Plank Road. He and his cousin were playing with sticks on the road. A propane tank truck approached from up the hill moving too fast and something wasn’t right with it. The driver waved at them to get out of the way. Then it disappeared around a curve and exploded.
The truck had crashed near one of three houses owned by Kent’s father, Doug Goodermote. At the time two families lived in that house, the Kenneth Jones family and John and Mary Jean Brazie family. Kent and his family had moved out of that house only recently. The house was destroyed by the fire that belched out of the ruptured propane tank.
Another of Doug Goodermote’s houses across the road on the south side, the residence of Percy Huff, was partially destroyed. Goodermote said the electric wires caught fire and set the upper story on fire. Unlike most, this house was partially saved.
Goodermote said that his father, who owned the Cash Market at the time, was just closing up the store and locking the door when the explosion hit. He thought that an airplane had crashed. He ran up the Plank Road and found the driver stuck in the cab of his truck. He and Noel McCumber were able to get him out. The driver kept saying, “What happened? What happened?”
Kent said he saw Mary Jean Brazie hugging her child coming up the hill. He remembered that David Hayner went to her aid, put the two of them in a station wagon and they were taken to hospital.
The fact that Kent had seen the truck just before the crash came to the attention of a State Police Trooper. So Kent spent some time that night at the Berlin Hotel, headquarters for the disaster response, being questioned about what he had seen. And that wasn’t the end of it. For months and even years thereafter he had to answer the same questions from insurance investigators.
That night Kent’s father gave the keys to his store to members of the Rescue Squad and told them to take whatever they needed. They did so for three days. There was no charge
Stanton Goodermote is one of only three Berlin firefighters still living who responded to the Berlin Disaster. The others are Ivan Wager and Bob Bentley. He was 28 at the time, employed in Pittsfield as a draftsman with General Electric. He was also the Town Clerk. He was eating supper at about 5:30 pm on July 25, 1962, at his home on Elm Street where he resided with his wife Gladys and their two children. There was a roar, and the dishes rattled. Running out to the porch, Goodermote saw up in the sky what appeared to be a massive mushroom cloud of flame. He had no idea what it could be. “I couldn’t imagine,” he said.
Whatever it was, there was fire everywhere. He ran to the hotel to call for mutual aid, but the Fire Department had already done that. He ran up the Plank Road to where the propane truck had crashed. Don Lamphier’s house was already fully inflamed and beginning to collapse. Fortunately no one was at home. Goodermote then went over to the Baptist Church looking for the Berlin fire engine. The top of the steeple was on fire. The Church door was locked, but there was no pressure in the hoses anyway and no ladder tall enough to get up to the roof. “There was so much fire,” he said, “we didn’t know where to go, where to start.” There were houses burning all around, and they couldn’t put those fires out and couldn’t do anything with the Church.
Goodermote went over to the old Berlin High School building where his friend Frank Jones had renovated a space upstairs as an apartment for his family. Jones had thought the building would escape the fire, but it had begun to be consumed from the top down just as the Church had. The cupola was on fire. Goodermote helped put water on the roof from a ladder, but it got too hot with flames shooting out of the eaves. They had to back off.
Someone said that Ken and Florence McCumber needed help. Their home had been destroyed. They found the couple in a creek nearby, still conscious but badly burned.
It was frustrating for the beleaguered firefighters and rescue people. “It was overwhelming,” Goodermote said. “There was fire every place. There was too much to do. We didn’t know what to do next.” For the rest of the night they tried just to wet down the nearby houses so that the fire would not spread.
“But the whole town worked together,” Goodermote said. “Everyone tried to help one another. People brought the firefighters food and water that night. It was a good community effort.”
When Mary Jean Brazie heard the truck crash, she grabbed 16 month old John Henry out of his high chair and fled out the front of the house on to Plank Road. Then the fire ball hit and set the house and herself on fire. Husband John Brazie was trapped for a time in the back of the house under a collapsed porch roof. Mary Jean saved young John’s life, but she died later in hospital from her burns. John, the “miracle baby,” lives now in Tennessee, probably the only surviving person of those who were injured. He grew up knowing pain, endured numerous surgeries on his arms and legs and lives still to this day with pain and other complications from his burns. All in all he said, “I’m still alive and doing well.” His birth mother saved him from perishing in the flames, but John credits his adoptive mother with being the only thing that enabled him to cope and survive. “She put up with me all those years and taught me things that she doesn’t realize she taught me,” John said.
Ivan Wager was 26. He had been a member of the Berlin Fire Department for only a few days when, while in Petersburgh, he got that fateful call. “And I
responded to the scene,” he said. His first assignment, with two others, was to quell the fire in the Baptist Church steeple. “We thought it was just the steeple,” he said. “But sparks started coming up through the flat tarpaper roof.” They abandoned the site and lost a hose line and a ladder. For some time Ivan drove a tanker to the bridge near Seagroatts to get water from the brook. “It was dry, like it is now,” said Wager. Jack Sweeney used a bulldozer to dam up the brook so there would be enough water. “Folks would stop at Clarence Williams’ gas station and various other places to fill five gallon gas cans to keep the fire trucks going,” he recalled. Throughout the night they battled hot spots. “[The explosion] took the top off the Percy Huff house. The Poestenkill and Wynantskill Departments saved that house.” Wager said fire departments from the whole County were there, as well as companies from Williamstown, MA, and Vermont. Communication was a problem. Berlin had two fire trucks a radio in only one of them. “It was quite a while before people knew what happened.” When word did reach people, they came in droves to see what was going on. “There were cars parked up and down the road. Sometimes it was difficult getting the tankers through. If you look at some of the old photos, you can see people standing there looking while firefighters are trying to put out the flames.”
He recalled the next day they found an end cap from a house trailer in the field above where the Brazie house had been. “It either went over or through the house,” he said. And there were the injured. Wager said he saw people he should have recognized but couldn’t because of their burns. His aunt was one of those killed.
Wager asked, “If it happened today, could we have saved any more people or property? No. Everything was on fire instantly. Today we would be better organized but only because of our training.” Communications are, of course, far superior today and there is a mutual aid system in place. Sweeney bulldozed the tanker from the scene to clear Plank Road. “Today,” said Wager, “you wouldn’t move it. It would sit there for two or three days. The whole scene would be isolated. It would be a crime scene. It would be at least three or four days before it would be cleared. And there would be no traffic allowed into Berlin.” Supposedly, said Wager, propane tankers of today can take a hit from a railroad train and not explode. He hopes that is true.
Of the firefighters that fought the Berlin fire, three still live in Town. Besides Ivan there is Stanton Goodermote and Bob Bentley. Wager is the only firefighter still active with the Department. He is also Fire Coordinator for all of Rensselaer County.
Jan Goodermote Newport was 23. She and her husband Dick lived in Delmar. Water there was not appropriate for clothes washing, so, on that fateful day, they were on their way to her parent’s home on Plank Road to do laundry. She recalls how surprised they were to see such a large tanker truck on
their route. It was going very slowly. The truck stopped at the top of the hill to let them pass. They continued on their way, greeted her mom, and Jan put the clothes in the wash. Just as she pushed the machine wash button the whole house shook! “What have I done,” she thought.
Dick, however, guessing that it was the tanker, rushed off. Jan went out and saw Jack Brazie on the hill, his hair singed and smoking. She recalls, to her chagrin, asking if anyone was hurt.
The Huff family lived across the street from the Brazie home, and she spent time helping the family remove a gun collection and photographs from their home. “We had no idea of the horror that was going on down the hill. We thought for certain their house would go as it was so close to those already burning.” The house was spared.
Dick’s military training came into play, she said, as he spent most of the night unhooking propane tanks from various nearby homes.
Jan’s father, Loyal Goodermote, was out of town picking up building supplies. He returned to traffic jams and chaos and uncertainty about his family and home. “My father rebuilt the [Baptist] Church,” she said with pride.
She was appalled that so many came to see the devastation. At the Historical Society meeting last week she learned that milk cans were placed throughout the Town and people donated thousands of dollars to help those in need and restore the community.
Leona Jones Kenney grew up on Main Street in Berlin. She was about 20 or so when she was coming home on the Plank Road. There was a propane tanker in front of her. About four or five houses from the end of the road she saw the tank as it went around the corner. “The curve went to the right,” she said. “And the tank went around and rolled to the left. I stopped in the middle of the road. I don’t know why.”
“In a matter of seconds there was a football field sized light gray cloud [in front of me],” she recalled. “I had to scrunch down to see out the windshield. Then poof. I really can’t remember any sound, and I didn’t see any fire. I got out of the car, and there was a girl coming towards me. She had a badly burned bundle in her arms. There was no fire on her. At first I thought she had on baggy white slacks. It was her skin. She kept saying ‘Help my baby, help my baby.’ I didn’t know what to do. People a couple of cars back put her in their car and took her to the hospital. A man was following behind her. He was walking on tip toes saying, ‘It hurts; it hurts.’ His feet looked like they were covered in tar. Someone put him in a car and headed to a hospital.”
Leona said she turned her car around and headed back up the mountain. “I stopped in Poestenkill and told them they need help in Berlin.” Finally arriving home by a roundabout route, she found that her family’s house across the street from the inferno was spared. “My father (Milford Jones) found the driver of the truck,” she said. “He said the driver kept saying, ‘Why did I go so far?’ My father said the man was just charred.”
She recalled a doctor coming by and then WTEN newsman George Lezotte banging on the door wanting to talk to her. Her boyfriend (later husband Jim Kenney) made him go away. She recalls that her face was all puffed out and she slept for three days. “When I woke up all those people had died,” she said. “All these people I knew were gone.”
She said there were gawkers for weeks. For Berlin people it was awful. “Everybody knew everybody; it was so hard,” she said.
She said she couldn’t attend the 30th anniversary event of the fire as it was still too painful. She did go to the Historical Society event last week, accompanied by her son and daughter and their children. There are two ironies, if you will. The grandparents of her daughter-in-law were the Lokers. Leona now lives in Hoosick Falls on Route 22. Across the street from her house is a large commercial propane tank.
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