Like Sunday, the same day 50 years earlier was a hot, muggy afternoon.

Then, families had descended upon the Ogeechee River near Meldrim, seeking the cool relief of the river. At 3:40 on the afternoon of June 28, 1959, the river turned out to be a lifesaver for some — and for some, the place where they perished.

A train headed east over the trestle spanning the river derailed, and 14 cars plunged toward the river and ground below. Of those cars, two of them contained propane gas, and one of them leaked its contents. Somehow, a spark hit the gas cloud and in a flash, the weekend playground of many Meldrim area families was turned into a raging inferno. The flash fire, according to the post-accident report compiled by the Interstate Commerce Commission, spread 500 feet east of the east end of the trestle, 525 feet west and 400 feet north of the track.

The explosion claimed the lives of 23 people, and the Meldrim community gathered again Sunday at Meldrim Memorial Park to remember the loss of those family members and friends five decades ago.

“It almost wiped out some whole families,” said Stephen Newsome, a lifelong Meldrim resident who put together Sunday’s memorial observance.

Said survivor George Hodges, who had eluded the deadly fireball: “It was a bad day.”

Survivors and victims
Hodges saw the railcars tumble off the track and didn’t hesitate to get his pregnant wife out of the way.

“We swam out,” he said. “I jumped in the deep side and took my wife with me.”

Hodges and his wife were sitting on the edge of the sandbar. He had been holding Ted Barnes and handed the toddler back to his mother when he saw the cars fall off the track.

“It was almost like a nightmare,” he said. “But I didn’t wait. I grabbed my wife’s hand and swam to the deep side.”

The current carried them down, and Hodges called over for C.R. Saturday, who helped him get his over the stump of a tree.

“That’s what saved us,” he said.

L.B. Slater got to the river about 15 minutes after the gas tanks erupted. With his wife’s stepfather in tow, they first came across a black form laying on the ground. It was one of the victims, with her grandson nearby.

“She started up toward the clubhouse, and the fire caught her,” Slater said. “She dropped the baby, and he fell about a foot from her hand. It looked like she was reaching out to him, trying to get him.”

Slater came across a survivor who had tried to reach her vehicle, a Ford convertible, to get out of the disaster.

“She said, ‘L.B. am I gonna live?’” he said.

The first helicopter from Hunter Air Force Base, as it was known then, arrived, and Slater made his way down to the trestle.

“You get to looking at things like that … I’ve been in Meldrim all my life. It’s not like when you go in the service. You’re going to see that in combat. But I saw that right here in my hometown,” he said.

A wall of fire
Hodges said it wasn’t long after the rail cars hit the river before the gas that leaked ignited.

“We got on the bank and started running,” he said. “There was about 15 people who got out that way and then whoom!, it went off, like a big match. I looked back and it was fire as high as the trees, a wall of fire behind us. At a certain point, it stopped. That was as far as the gas went. We had to outrun the gas. If we hadn’t, we would have been burned up. I had to get my wife out of there. She was five months pregnant.”

Hodges and the others who escaped the inferno made their way to Picnic Landing. He got Mr. Hayes, who lived nearby, and a handful of young black men with a red truck volunteered to help. They piled mattresses into the back of the truck and used those to carry the hurt and the dying to the road.

‘We went in there blind. Those boys were heroes because we didn’t know what we were going to find,” Hodges said. “I didn’t know who they were. I never seen them before in my life. But they volunteered to help me. Mr. Hayes got a mattress and we found this family. We bandaged them up and gave them first aid and loaded them on the mattress and drove them out of there.”

Two of the people they carried out on the mattresses eventually died, but a couple of others lived. The disaster nearly wiped out entire families in an instant. Slater attended six funerals in one day in the aftermath.

“When you lose a family, you’re going to break down,” Slater said. “It’s going to kill you inside. That’s what it done to me. But I still talk to people. It’s hard.”

Rose Harvey was 17 years old and in Savannah when the derailment and explosion happened. She heard about it on the radio, but it was a week before she was able to get to the site of the accident.

When she got there, it was unlike anything she had ever seen.

“It looked like a war zone,” she said. “Nobody would have ever dreamed anything like that was possible.”

It took years for the area — scorched and charred by the massive fire that swept down the river — to bloom again, Harvey said. It remains a popular gathering spot, even today. Newsome spent last Thursday there, equipped with his Blackberry so he could continue to work while enjoying the water.

A sense of community
The Meldrim community was a close-knit place before the disaster, and the ensuing tragedy only served to bring it closer together still.

“The best people you’ll ever meet in your life live right here,” Hodges said. “We were all like family. If something happened to one person here, it happened to everybody.”

Newsome has been Slater’s neighbor for his whole life, and the effect of the derailment and explosion can still be felt today.

“These are all my friends and neighbors. Just about every one of the seniors here has a connection to it,” he said.

Meldrim remains a small community, and neighbors still look after each other, according to Newsome.

“I know just about everybody in Meldrim,” he said. “Where else can you let your kids run and play in the neighborhood and not worry about them?”

Meldrim DVD
A DVD of the Meldrim train disaster is available through the Web site www.meldrim.com. Each DVD is $10 and proceeds go toward the Meldrim Memorial Park.