Photo courtesy Special Collections, University of Memphis Libraries.
For years, the Quaker Oats Company on Chelsea had stockpiled more than 70,000 tons of corncobs, heaped into a mountain six stories high. A chemical extracted from those cobs, called “furfural,” was the main ingredient in nylon, plastics, and insecticides.
On December 2, 1958, the corncobs began smoldering, and once that fire got going — probably as the result of spontaneous combustion deep inside the pile, though some say it was a lightning strike — it was difficult to put out. When corncobs burn, a plastic shell forms over their surface, preventing water from reaching the flames. Firemen brought in bulldozers to push the cobs this way and that, but it was slow going. And in the 1950s, fire crews weren’t fitted with masks and oxygen tanks, so more than 20 firemen were admitted to area hospitals for smoke inhalation, their lungs seared by the smoke and chemicals.
The corncobs burned for almost a month, forming a column of smoke visible for miles, until the blaze was finally extinguished on December 24th. It was an unusual challenge for local firefighters, and for years afterwards, fire officials held seminars — “Operation Corncob” — to teach other cities what to do if they encountered a similar problem.
