Search After Tennessee Explosion Finds No Survivors, Officials Say

Investigators said on Saturday that no survivors had been found in a search through the volatile remnants of a Tennessee ammunition plant where 18 people were reported missing after an explosion a day earlier.

In an emotional news conference, Sheriff Chris Davis of Humphreys County, Tenn., said that the likelihood of finding anyone alive had diminished to the point that the search had shifted to a recovery effort.

“We can assume they are deceased at this point,” Sheriff Davis told reporters on Saturday. He choked up as he described the toll. “It’s a great loss,” he said.

Within hours of the blast, the sheriff warned that the extensive devastation included multiple fatalities, but the specific toll had remained unclear.

Officials had initially said that 19 people were missing, but one person was found at home, safe.

Beyond that, officials said, the findings were grim and devastating. Investigators were using DNA as they tried to identify the people whose remains had been found at the site.

An emergency medical helicopter and an ambulance were standing by, but officials said that was a reflection of the danger posed to the few hundred law enforcement officers who were combing through the debris. The highly volatile materials at the site had become even more unpredictable after the heat and pressure they had been exposed to during the explosion, officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said on Saturday.

Because of that, the search has been “very delicate, very methodical,” Sheriff Davis said.

“We were already going slow, and we’re slowing things down even more,” Jason Craft, the Sheriff of Hickman County, said at the news conference. (The plant straddles both Hickman and Humphreys Counties.)

The explosion erupted around 7:45 a.m. Central time at the plant roughly 60 miles from Nashville, in a wooded area just off Interstate 40. The plant is operated by Accurate Energetic Systems, a company that produces explosives and demolition charges for the U.S. military and the domestic blasting industry.

The blast was so powerful that it leveled a building in the complex and, for residents over a dozen miles away, the explosion felt like it had happened just outside their homes. The immediate aftermath was a fiery stretch of mangled metal and debris from the destroyed building and the scorched remains of vehicles that had been parked outside.

The rubble covered an area of roughly half of a square mile, the authorities said.

The explosion triggered a series of smaller blasts, with officials warning there could be more because of the combustible material at the site. It also produced a cascade of anguish in a rural and tightly knit community, where for hours afterward one of the few certainties was that there were employees of the plant who had not survived.

“You want me to be honest? It’s hell,” Sheriff Davis said at a news conference on Friday. “It’s hell on us. It’s hell on everybody involved.” He had personal ties to some of the people who had been directly affected, he said. “There’s three families in this I’m very close to.”

But he added that his circumstances would hardly be unique, given the small population of the area and the widespread connections that many residents have to the plant. “We know each other,” he said.

The plant employs around 75 people across five production centers and a lab, according to a page about the company posted by the Association of the United States Army, which lists Accurate Energetic Systems as a sponsor. The 1,300-acre property caters to all branches of the U.S. military, according to the association’s page, as well as international military and law enforcement agencies.

Since 2020, Accurate Energetic Systems has received more than $65 million in federal contracts, mostly from the Army, supplying explosives used in weapons work, according to government records.

The explosion has underscored the dangers associated with producing these volatile materials, and it had the potential to rank among the country’s deadliest industrial disasters. One man was killed and four others were injured in 2014 in an explosion at the same site in an area operated by a different company, Rio Ammunition. Officials said multiple companies have operated there.

Aaron Krolik contributed reporting.