AUSTIN, Texas — This weekend, the people of Texas City – a town of about 52,000 on the Houston ship channel – will honor the memory of the hundreds who died there 75 years ago when explosions ripped through ships that were docked at the city’s port.
For communities that lined Galveston Bay and the ship channel, the years following World War II brought jobs and prosperity to the thousands of workers who benefitted from the rise of the petrochemical industry.
A routine arrival of the French freighter Grand Camp at the docks in Texas City in mid-April 1947 to take on a heavy load of ammonium nitrate fertilizer went without notice.
But as longshoremen loaded the ship, someone smelled smoke. A small fire had broken out deep inside the Grand Camp. The captain ordered that steam be used to smother the fire, which created brightly colored smoke that drew people to the dock to watch.
On April 16, 1947, the unimaginable: A massive explosion.
The blast was so powerful that it was heard 250 miles away in Louisiana. Flaming debris ignited oil storage tanks at the chemical plants nearby. Hundreds of people died that day, most of them bystanders who had come to watch the fire.
Though no one could determine a final death count, it's estimated to have been 500 to 600 people. No identifiable traces were ever found of the 100 or so people closest to the blast.
In Texas City 75 years later, there are memorials to a time that lingers in the collective memory of the community including the huge anchor of the Grand Camp that was blown several miles away from the blast site. It’s now displayed in a park that honors the memory of those who died.
Sixty-six years almost to the day after the Texas City disaster – April 17, 2013 - an ammonium nitrate fertilizer explosion devastated another Texas town.
Fifteen people died and hundreds were hurt when a fire inside the West, Texas, fertilizer plant near Waco ignited the chemical. Authorities determined that someone had deliberately started that fire at the plant, though no one has been arrested.
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