On April 16th 1947, Texas city was waking up to another day in the post-war boom that had been
benefiting the Texas coastal town. Located some 40 miles south of Houston, and across the bay from
Galveston, the city had a population of around 16,000. By 8:30 in the morning a large column
of smoke was rising from a ship that was in the port and crowds started to form along the shore.
40 minutes later that ship exploded. In the days that followed,
the extent of the disaster became clear. It is generally considered to have been the worst
industrial accident in the history of the United States. History that deserves to be remembered.
Texas City was founded in 1891 by three brothers from Minnesota who saw potential in the site. They
bought ten thousand acres around an area called Shoal Point, and optimistically dubbed it Texas
City. The first ocean-going ship arrived in 1904, and the following year a customs house was opened
there. The port grew quickly in the years it followed. It served only 12 ships in 1904,
but 239 arrived in 1910. In 1908, the first refinery was built in the city and soon several
more were built making Texas City a major port for the shipping of Texas petroleum.
More factories followed, including a sugar refinery, and a fig processing plant. By 1925,
the town had 3,500 residents. In 1940, Texas City saw 3,907 vessels, handled over 13 million tons of
cargo. Numbers only surpassed in Texas by Houston, Beaumont and Port Arthur. World War II brought a
flurry of activity to the city. A tin smelter was built, a first in the western hemisphere. At one
point the plant produced around 45 percent of the world's total production of tin. The war had shut
down much of the supply of oil from Middle Eastern countries to the European allies, and Texas City
refineries were in high demand throughout the war. Other factories were open as well, such as
a petrochemical plant to make styrene monomer used in rubber production, and a pipe bending
plant which supplied pipe for naval and merchant vessels. By the end of the war, Texas City was
unquestionably a major industrial city and port. During the war the huge numbers of workers who
came in to build factories, and roads, and more filled every hotel in Texas City and Galveston
as well. They were forced to sleep in trailers, tents and cars. The city's future looked bright as
gasoline, and other goods were in high demand for the rebuilding of Europe in the post-war years.
On April 11th 1947, the french-owned SS Grandcamp arrived at Texas City's port. The Grandcamp
was built as the SS Benjamin R Curtis, a liberty ship in 1942. The Benjamin R Curtis served in the
Pacific operating in the army transportation service. It was mothballed after the war,
but in a gesture of friendship, many liberty ships were given to allied nations by the United States
to assist in the rebuilding of fleets, and infrastructure following the war.
The French Line, a French shipping company that had become famous in the pre-war years
for its prestigious ocean liners, was given 32 liberty ships for this purpose.
The Grandcamp was traveling from Houston to Brest, but was in Texas City specifically to receive
ammonium nitrate used as fertilizer, and as an explosive in military munitions. Houston had
banned ammonium nitrate from its own port just the year before. Ammonium nitrate was known to
be explosive, in fact the US was exporting it as fertilizer from plants that had been making
munitions during the war and the plants themselves were under federal oversight. But ammonium nitrate
is only explosive under certain conditions. When heated, it naturally decomposes into
nitrous oxide and water, but will not explode. It will explode if something else detonates near it,
which is why it was used as an explosive in weaponry. The only other way it can explode
is if it is heated quickly, it can even catch fire without detonating. At 575 degrees it will smoke,
but there's only the risk of an explosion if it's in a confined space, and the heat cannot escape.
Despite the danger there were no special instructions on handling,
or transporting the material which port laborers said was in the same class as cement, or flour.
The Department of Agriculture said that commercial fertilizer mixtures
containing ammonium nitrate require no special precautions regarding explosions.
When the Grandcamp arrived it already had a cargo of compressed cotton, sisal binder twine,
machinery, tobacco, shelled peanuts, and 16 cases of small arms ammunition. On April 14th, they
began loading 2,500 tons of fertilizer, by the following day 1,900 tons had been brought aboard,
but rain forced workers to wait until the morning of the 16th to complete loading. Nearby was the
US cargo ship High Flyer which carried 961 tons of fertilizer, as well as 1,000 tons of sulfur.
On the morning of Wednesday April 16th, 1947, work began as usual. At 8 am, a worker in the
hold smelled smoke. Soon a plume of it was visible among the sacks of ammonium nitrate.
Two fire extinguishers, and a jug of water were used but made no difference, The men were ordered
out of the hold. The French captain insisted that authorities not pour water into the holes that
might ruin cargo, and instead the hatches were shut tight and steam was poured into the hold.
This he thought would smother the flames. Men did begin removing the ammunition from one of the
other holds. The fire continued to grow, crew were ordered out of the ship and the Grandcamp finally
sounded its alarm whistle. A half hour after smoke had first been seen the fire department
was called. At about 8 30 a.m the hatch covers of the hole were blown off. Pressure had been
increasing steadily thanks to steam and nitrous oxide produced by the fertilizer. An enormous
plume of orange smoke from the burning fertilizer billowed out, and was visible for miles. Onlookers
began gathering, some within a few hundred feet of the boat. Twenty six volunteers of the local fire
department arrived, they were soon followed by a firefighting team from the Republic Oil Refining
Company. Hoses were putting water on the ship by 8:45 but the ship was already so hot that the
water was instantly vaporizing. The smoke, still pouring out, was described as a pretty gold yellow
color, and one witness said that the orange smoke in the morning sunlight was beautiful to see.
At 9:12 a.m the Grandcamp exploded. The explosion was so loud it could be heard 150 miles away,
and broke windows 40 miles away, knocked two low-flying planes out of the air.
People in Galveston across the bay were knocked to their knees, and 15 miles north, buildings swayed
in Baytown. Crews still on board the ship, along with the firefighters were obliterated by heat,
and pressure. Shrapnel and flames killed nearby onlookers. At a Monsanto plant across the slip,
145 of the 450 workers on shift were killed. A 15-foot wave pushed a barge 100 feet ashore,
and sucked injured, and dead into the water as it receded.
Fragments of the ship were flung as far as a mile raining down on the port and the town beyond it.
The heavy fragments were followed by burning balls of sisal and cotton. Oil storage tanks at
nearby refineries were torn open, and fires began burning all over. An enormous black mushroom cloud
billowed over the city, a beacon of disaster. Most of the injuries occurred close to the ship where
hundreds of people were already standing. About 112 people standing within 500 feet survived,
although not unscathed. Officer W.A Reeves was flung 600 feet into a ditch and nearly drowned.
Twenty six year old longshoreman and army veteran Jim Newland was standing about 100 feet from the
ship, when he came to after the explosion he was nearly a mile away. All his clothes had been blown
off except for his shirt collar, and shoes, yet he survived only passing away in 2015. Survivor
H.O Ray who worked in the terminal railway office said frankly, “I thought it was resurrection day.”
Many of those who survived had ruptured ear drums from the concussion. The nearby Monsanto facility
was completely destroyed and many more buildings reduced to rubble. The ship itself was completely
gone. A 20-ton piece landed 2,500 feet away, while 40-foot sections of the keel landed nearly a mile
away. A 30-foot piece of the bow stem was hurled 1,300 feet, and the one and a half ton anchor was
found 1.6 miles away. The blast registered on a seismograph as far away as Denver Colorado.
The poorest parts of the town were right against the industrial area. The
ramshackle Barrio of hispanic workers, and The Bottom, where black workers lived.
The buildings there were largely destroyed by the explosion, but more died there in the two days
afterwards when fires burned through the city. The smoke quickly reduced visibility to nearly zero.
“Wounded fled the docks, grotesque figures, they were. Black with fuel oil and smoke, and red with
their own and comrade's blood. Walking with arms broken and dangling, or crawling with mangled legs
and feet.” one witness said. The town's three small clinics were overwhelmed, but doctors,
ambulances and more began arriving from Galveston, military bases, and elsewhere. Police arrived
to help keep order. Fort Crockett, an inactive military base in Galveston was opened and used
as a temporary surgical hospital. The Telephone Workers Union temporarily suspended a strike
until the emergency had passed. Even Boy Scout troops were called out to assist in the relief.
However there was no disaster plan in place and no way to quickly organize a response.
Even the municipal buildings in the center of town where the mayor tried to set up a headquarters was
badly damaged. Disorganized groups of rescuers searched for survivors and wounded. It wasn't
until that afternoon that rescuers got aboard the High Flyer, which had been abandoned by its crew,
and noticed smoke coming from the holds. High Flyer had been blown from its mooring by the
explosion, and heavily damaged, swung into a third ship, the Wilson B. King. By 6 pm, the fire was
so intense in the holds that it drove rescuers away. Throughout the day several alarms went out
about possible explosions, and numerous people were concerned about the High Flyers cargo, but
experts told the mayor it was unlikely the fertilizer posed a significant risk. It took hours
for no one to realize how serious the situation was, and it wasn't until 11 pm that tugs arrived
to pull the ship away from the docks. Workers cut one of the ship's anchors away but could
only manage to drag the ship about 50 feet when Bureau of Mines engineers arriving on the scene
heard about the fertilizer and the High Flyers cargo of sulfur they immediately left, advising
everyone else to do the same. No one seems to have told the mayor who just before 1am was on
the radio assuring everyone that there was no risk of a second explosion. At 1 am on April 17th, the
ship was still stuck at the port and balls of fire began shooting out of the ship's holds. The tugs
decided to retreat but hadn’t made it far when the High Flyer exploded, disabling the nearest tug,
though nearly miraculously, not sinking it. Again, the liberty ship simply disintegrated,
throwing an enormous fireball into the night sky. Fewer people were on the docks since the
engineer's warning, but at least two more were killed in the initial explosion, and 24 injured.
Witnesses to both explosions thought the High Flyer explosion was even greater than the first.
The Keene, nearly on top of their ship, had its aft obliterated before sections sank. More oil
tanks burst into flame as red hot pieces of metal tumbled into the stricken city. While no catalog
of the first explosion's damage had been made, one of the engineers was much amazed at the additional
destruction from the second explosion the next morning. The grain elevator was pierced and
eventually the whole elevator fell. One third of the houses in the city would be condemned
for damage, almost none were without significant damage. A Houston Post photographer who had been
a war correspondent, likened the damage to the town as if a flight of B-29 Superfortresses had
bombed it. Another veteran quoted in the Fort Worth Star Telegram said that “the catastrophe
was worse than anything that he had seen in three years of combat with Halsey's third fleet.”
By the time of the second explosion there were more ambulances and a halfway organized system in
place to extract the wounded. Smaller explosions rocked the heavy industrial waterfront throughout
the night. The next day pilots reported that smoke from Texas City stretched as far as Missouri.
Even the days afterwards were considerably confused. The Red Cross and military had no
system in place to facilitate cross-organizational communication, and often work cross-purposes. No
one was in charge, and groups worked against each other, as often as with each other during,
and after the explosions. They had no way to know that by April 17th, the worst was over. Official
casualty reports listed 581 dead. 406 were identified, and a further 113 were classified as
missing as no identifiable body parts were found, including 27 of the 28 volunteer firefighters.
In June 1947, the bodies of the unidentified were interred together in a memorial cemetery
and park. Some speculate that the two numbers of dead are even larger,
including travelers and undocumented families, and more who were near the port. The personnel
and payroll records of the Monsanto Company were destroyed making the losses among their workers,
many of whom were itinerant, impossible to identify. More than 5,000 people were injured,
and wounded were sent to 21 hospitals in the region. Thousands were left homeless, and the
property damage was estimated to be around 100 million dollars, well over a billion dollars when
adjusted for inflation. And hundreds of millions of dollars worth of oil products also burned.
What exactly caused the fire of the blast is still unknown.
Workers stated the fertilizer was unnaturally warm the day before the explosion, but
a Coast Guard investigation speculated that someone may have discarded a cigarette carelessly.
As for the explosions, it may have been caused when the ship's fuel tanks ruptured, and gasoline
came into contact with the fertilizer. The Coast Guard suggested that the disaster may have been
prevented had the fire been initially fought with hoses rather than steam. The terrible tragedy was
also the cause of the first class-action suit against the United States government.
In district court the government was found guilty of severe negligence, but the Supreme
Court eventually affirmed the overturning of the decision. In 1956, a Special Act of Congress
sponsored by Galveston's US representative Clark Thompson, settled all claims for a total of 16
and a half million dollars, on top of some 32 million paid by private insurance claims.
The city undaunted rebuilt, buoyed by promises from major corporations to stay in the city.
That gave the city its motto, “The city that would not die.”
Perhaps the largest long-term effect was the way that it affected the regulation
of hazardous chemicals, and the creation of disaster preparedness organizations.
The National Red Cross re-examined its entire disaster relief program. The Industrial Mutual
Aid System was created by Carbide and Carbon Chemical to streamline firefighting and
disaster preparedness and response between industry, the Red Cross, and the government.
Other groups formed as well. Many consider the disaster to be a turning point in
disaster preparation, changing thinking from reacting to disasters, to anticipating them.
While it received national attention at the time, the Texas City disaster has largely
faded from the public memory. Author Michael Bowman noted in 2017 that the 70th anniversary
of the disaster raised little interest outside the Greater Houston Galveston area,
and the reason, he speculates, says much about society today.
“We remember Mount Saint Helens,” he argues, “because it's not every day that a volcano erupts
in america. “But,” he notes, “deadly industrial accidents are quite common.”
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