Our companion report covers what happened aboard the ship that started it: on the morning of April 16, 1947, fire broke out in the hold of the French-owned freighter Grandcamp as she loaded some 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer at the Texas City docks, and at 9:12 a.m. her cargo detonated. The explosion destroyed the dock area and the neighbouring Monsanto chemical plant, raised a fifteen-foot wave across the waterfront, and killed hundreds of people on the spot — among them all 26 Texas City firemen at the scene, and every piece of the city’s fire equipment with them. What followed turned a disaster into the deadliest industrial accident in American history.
A second ship, the High Flyer, lay in the same slip undergoing repairs, loaded with 1,000 tons of ammonium nitrate and 2,000 tons of sulfur. Ignited by the first explosion and torn from her moorings, she drifted against the freighter Wilson B. Keene. All through the night, tugs tried to haul her clear of the docks and managed to move her barely a hundred feet. At 1:10 a.m. on April 17, some sixteen hours after the Grandcamp, the High Flyer exploded — by many accounts more violently than the first ship — destroying the Wilson B. Keene and devastating the waterfront a second time.
When the fires finally burned out, the Red Cross and the Texas Department of Public Safety recorded 581 people killed across the two days: 405 identified, 63 recovered but never identified, and the rest still listed as missing. The injured numbered in the thousands, more than a thousand residences and buildings were damaged or destroyed, and property losses were put at some $67 million in 1947 dollars. The unidentified dead were buried together in June 1947 in a memorial cemetery set aside for them. The cause of the fire in the Grandcamp’s hold was never proven; a discarded cigarette is the theory most often given.
Texas City rebuilt: its docks, plants and housing were restored by 1950. In the courts, the disaster produced the first mass class-action lawsuit ever brought against the United States government — Dalehite v. United States, filed on behalf of 8,485 plaintiffs under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which blamed the government’s fertilizer program for the catastrophe. A federal trial court found the government negligent, the Fifth Circuit reversed, and in 1953 the Supreme Court affirmed the reversal, holding the claims barred by the Act’s discretionary-function exception. Congress then answered with a special act of its own, settling more than 3,000 remaining claims for $16.5 million by 1956.
In Texas City Memorial Park stand the Grandcamp’s two-ton anchor — hurled more than a mile and a half by the explosion — and a propeller from the High Flyer; the Grandcamp’s five-ton anchor rests at the entrance to the Texas City Dike. Nearly six decades later the city was struck again: our companion report tells the story of the Texas City Refinery Explosion of March 23, 2005.