Remember Texas City

At 9:12 AM on April 16, 1947, a seismologist in Denver, Colorado noted an unusual vibration on his seismograph.  Calculations showed that it originated on the Texas Gulf Coast, when some 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer on a ship docked at Texas City, Texas exploded in milliseconds.  The resulting blast killed at least 581 people, injured thousands more, destroyed a number of chemical plants and refineries in the vicinity, and became the largest industrial accident in the history of the United States. 

 

Today, every town of any size has an emergency management plan, and regular drills are practiced for various kinds of accidents and crises:  floods, fires, storms, and so on.  Chemicals that can explode spontaneously are labeled as such, and extensive regulations prescribe how they must be safely stored, handled, and transported.  But in 1947, all these practices lay in the future as the industrial might of the U. S. was turned from making war materiel to assisting Europe in recovering from World War II. 

 

One critical component of many munitions was ammonium nitrate, a chemical which is both a blessing and a curse.  The blessing is that it dissolves easily in water and provides more nitrogen per pound than almost any other kind of fertilizer.  The curse is that it is highly unstable.  When detonated with a suitable blasting cap or other primer, it violently decomposes with a shock-wave detonation into nitrogen, oxygen, and steam—all gases that expand with tremendous force.  And when confined in large volumes, as on board the French freighter SS Grandcamp, an ammonium-nitrate fire stands a good chance of spontaneously detonating.  As described in exacting and vivid detail by biographer of George W. Bush Bill Minutaglio in his excellent City on Fire, that is exactly what happened after a fire of unknown origin was detected earlier in the day on the clear spring morning of April 16, as the ship was being loaded with fertilizer bound for Europe.

 

Minutaglio's extensive research for the book provides intimate and fascinating details about the lives of dozens of players in the disaster, ranging from sailors aboard the Grandcamp to the volunteer fire department's chief, the mayor, and leaders of the privately-owned port authority which was in charge of loading the ship from railroad cars at the port.  I would like to focus on the two safety practices which were glaringly absent that day:  labeling of potentially explosive chemicals and the practice of making emergency-management plans.

 

As was brought out in detail during a decade-long series of lawsuits following the disaster which established the precedent of class-action lawsuits against the Federal government, the fertilizer bags carried no hint that ammonium nitrate could be explosive under some conditions.  This is despite the fact that the same Midwestern factories that made the fertilizer for peaceful purposes had only a few short years ago been making the same stuff for munitions.  One or two chemical engineers or others with a technical background in Texas City knew of the explosive tendencies of ammonium nitrate.  But no members of the volunteer fire department—all but one of whom died in the explosion—knew about the dangers.  No one on the ship knew, especially the captain, who in a misguided attempt to salvage the cargo, sealed the hold and ordered live steam injected into it.  And none of the ordinary workers and citizens of Texas City knew that if anything went wrong, there was enough explosive on board the Grandcamp to destroy most of the town.  And it did.

 

The Grandcamp explosion was only the beginning of a disaster that went out of control well into the night.  Flying blazing debris ignited and destroyed most of a Monsanto chemical plant only a few hundred yards away from the dock, and broke loose a second fertilizer ship, the High Flyer, which eventually caught fire after it drifted across the port channel and collided with another ship.  The High Flyer exploded early the next morning and produced a bigger blast than the Grandcamp.  The only reason more fatalities didn't result from it was that nearly everyone who could get out of town by then had done so. 

 

Texas City's mayor, Curtis Trahan, survived the blast because he was at the city's equipment barns at the time, several blocks away.  While he did his best to coordinate rescue and medical efforts after the disaster, it was an exercise in making it up as he and his surviving citizens went along.  Eventually, as the magnitude of the disaster became known, Trahan received offers of assistance from the White House on down.  But coordinating and organizing the rescue and medical evacuation and treatment efforts amid the terrible damage, fires, and continuing explosions of oil refineries and chemical plants proved to be an almost insurmountable undertaking.  Instead, Trahan spent much of his time organizing the collection and identification of bodies where possible, although hundreds of missing people were never identified.

 

The terrible lessons taught by the Texas City disaster include the need to label all potentially explosive chemicals as such; the need to regulate the transportation and storage of such materials in a way that prevents explosions in case of fire; and the need to educate first responders and plan for various likely and not-so-likely scenarios when dealing with emergencies under the aegis of emergency management plans. 

 

Sadly, these lessons were not applied decades later in a similar disaster that struck West, Texas, a small town between Waco and the Dallas-Fort Worth area.  On April 17, 2013, a fire in an ammonium nitrate storage area of the West Fertilizer company attracted the attention of the volunteer fire department.  At 7:50 that evening, it exploded, killing 15 people and injuring at least 200, and destroying or damaging numerous structures.  On a smaller scale, the Texas City disaster repeated itself in West, where better storage practices and knowledge could have prevented or at least minimized the number of casualties.

 

Every day when ammonium nitrate is safely handled without incident is a good day.  We should be both thankful and mindful of the lessons learned at such cost, that have taught us the best practices of handling dangerous materials.  And anyone who reads Minutaglio's moving and dramatic account of the Texas City disaster will never forget those lessons.

 

Sources:  Bill Minutaglio's City on Fire:  The Forgotten Disaster That Devastated a Town and Ignited a Landmark Legal Battle was published in 2003 by HarperCollins.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles "West Fertilizer Company explosion," "Texas City disaster," and "Ammonium nitrate."