Austin Bay Blog

Texas City and the entire Houston Ship Channel complex of refineries and petro-chemical plants form one of America’s most dangerous industrial zones. Sure, it’s a terror target, oil is an Al Qaeda icon target, but danger is a fact of life when you’re making gasoline, fertilizer, and plastics. Here’s a wire service report with the details on the March 23 explosion that killed at least 14. Texas City is the site of one of the US’s all-time worst industrial disasters. As the article mentions, that took place in 1947. A fire on a ship led to an explosion that killed 576. I remember studying the Texas City disaster in Texas History class in junior high school. In fact, I wrote a short paper on the incident. April 16, 1947– “Texas City just blew up” is how it’s described.

Here’s a link to a website with the basic information on the 1947 fiasco.

The article begins with:

Just before 8:00 A.M., longshoremen removed the hatch covers on Hold 4 of the French Liberty ship Grandcamp as they prepared to load the remainder of a consignment of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Some 2,300 tons were already onboard, 880 of which were in the lower part of Hold 4. The remainder of the ship’s cargo consisted of large balls of sisal twine, peanuts, drilling equipment, tobacco, cotton, and a few cases of small ammunition. No special safety precautions were in focus at the time.
Several longshoremen descended into the hold and waited for the first pallets holding the 100-pound packages to be hoisted from dockside. Soon thereafter, someone smelled smoke. A plume was observed rising between the cargo holds and the ships hull, apparently about seven or eight layers of sacks down. Neither a gallon jug of drinking water nor the contents of two fire extinguishers supplied by crew members seemed to do much good. As the fire continued to grow, someone lowered a fire hose, but the water was not turned on. Since the area was filling fast with smoke, the longshoremen were ordered out of the hold.

It took an hour for the fire to spread. The narrative picks up at 9 AM:

Around 9:00, flames erupted from the open hatch, with smoke variously described as “a pretty gold, yellow color” or as “orange smoke in the morning sunlight…beautiful to see.” Twelve minutes later, the Grandcamp disintegrated in a prodigious explosion heard as far as 150 miles distant. A huge mushroom like cloud billowed more than 2,ooo feet into the morning air, the shockwave knocking two light planes flying overhead out of the sky. A thick curtain of steel shards scythed through workers along the docks and a crowd of curious onlookers who had gathered at the head of the slip at which the ship was moored. Blast over pressure and heat disintegrated the bodies of the firefighters and ship’s crew still on board. At the Monsanto plant, located across the slip, 145 of 450 shift workers perished. A fifteen-foot wave of water thrust from the slip by the force of the blast swept a large steel barge ashore and carried dead and injured persons back into the turning basin as it receded. Fragments of the Grandcamp, some weighing several tons, showered down throughout the port and town for several minutes, extending the range of casualties and property damage well into the business district, about a mile away. Falling shrapnel bombarded buildings and oil storage tanks at nearby refineries, ripping open pipes and tanks of flammable liquids and starting numerous fires. After the shrapnel, flaming balls of sisal and cotton from the ships cargo fell out of the sky, adding to the growing conflagration.

I’ll add an update to this once we’ve more details on the March 23, 2005 accident.

UPDATE: The death toll is now 15. What’s amazing is the coverage. I listened to an ABC News radio report about an hour ago. The death toll is confirmed then a senior oil company official says that the accident won’t affect oil or gasoline prices. Okay, a logical question. but still a bit crass. Approximately 25% of America’s petro-chemical and refining capacity is crammed into a rather compact triangle of the Texas Gulf Coast.

UPDTE 2: Comment 1– yes, that’s been thought of–and feared.