Texas City disaster site

The spectators came because the smoke was beautiful. On the morning of April 16, 1947, the French freighter Grandcamp was on fire at the Texas City dock — a smoldering load of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, the captain unwilling to flood the hold because the water would ruin the cargo. The smoke came up orange and purple, unusual enough that hundreds of people walked down to the waterfront to watch the fire department work. At 9:12 the Grandcamp detonated — twenty-three hundred tons of ammonium nitrate, the largest non-nuclear explosion in American history to that point.

The blast destroyed everything within two thousand feet — the Monsanto plant three hundred feet away, the warehouses, the rail yard. The ship's anchor, a ton and a half of steel, was thrown a mile and a half. The tidal wave the explosion pushed out of the harbor drowned the spectators the concussion hadn't killed. Twenty-six of the city's twenty-seven volunteer firemen died at the dock; the four trucks went with them. Then, sixteen hours later, the High Flyer — the ship in the next slip, also loaded with ammonium nitrate, torn loose by the first blast and drifted into the Wilson B. Keene — exploded too. Five hundred eighty-one people died. The count is still approximate; they never found all the bodies.

The disaster built the modern framework for chemical safety — the lawsuits that followed established the doctrine of government liability for negligence, and the regulations on ammonium nitrate handling that came out of Texas City are the reason the shipping of the fertilizer changed worldwide. The port rebuilt; the refinery rows on the bay are still there. The anchor that flew a mile and a half sits in a memorial park, and the park's fountain is shaped like the blast.

Texas City is the archive's purest disaster file — the catastrophe caused by the decision to save the cargo, watched by a crowd that didn't know what the orange smoke meant, and answered by the second explosion nobody was left to fight.