The Worst Industrial Disaster in US History
The deadliest industrial disaster in U.S. history occurred on April 16, 1947, in Texas City, Texas. When the French ship SS Grandcamp exploded, a thousand buildings were destroyed and hundreds of people were killed. Among the dead were half the firefighters in the Texas City Fire Department. All of their firefighting equipment was destroyed, too, which made the city more vulnerable to the damage of the second explosion.
U.S. Federal Government via Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain
Texas City, located on Galveston Bay, was founded in 1893 by a group of investors who dredged a channel for ships and built a railroad connection between the bay and two major railway lines. The town became a major shipping port where oil companies also built refineries, and soon other industries moved in to take advantage of the port. The city grew even faster during World War II when wartime production and shipping of materials went into overdrive. Soon, the U.S. government established War Department ordnance plants in the city to produce ammonium nitrate, widely used in explosives, especially as an oxidizer. Ammonium nitrate is also an effective fertilizer, and the factories switched over to fertilizer production after the war. But the dangers of storing and transporting large amounts of ammonium nitrate weren’t widely understood at that time—a dearth of knowledge that would have deadly consequences for Texas City.The town’s three medical clinics—which were also damaged in the blast—were immediately overwhelmed with wounded people. Emergency personnel from Galveston and other towns came to tend to the wounded and search for survivors trapped under rubble. Fred Dowdy, the assistant fire chief and one of the few firemen left in the city, coordinated firefighters responding from elsewhere; the remaining 20 volunteer firefighters would soon be killed trying to save the city, wiping out the entire volunteer firefighting force. The local high school was pressed into service as a temporary morgue.
But the disaster was far from over. About an hour after the explosion, the crew of the High Flyer abandoned ship to escape the thick smoke. No one discovered the fire in the hold—where a load of ammonium nitrate sat—until later that afternoon. Tugboats arrived to pull the High Flyer away from the dock, but the ship was stuck against the Wilson B. Keene, and at 1:10 a.m. on April 17, the High Flyer exploded. While almost everyone had been evacuated from the docks by then, the explosion sparked more fires in the city, and the Wilson B. Keene was destroyed.
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