Selects: The Texas City Disaster of 1947

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human Hey everyone, it's me, Josh and for this week's SYSK Selects I've chosen our episode on the Texas City disaster In Texas, they do everything bigger including industrial disasters In this episode from March of 2021 we cover one of the biggest explosions in American history made up of not one, but two huge blasts that leveled the refinery poor town of Texas City I hope you find this one as riveting as we did.

0:36Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

0:46Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there, and this is Stuff You Should Know.

0:59I was about to say natural disaster edition, but unnatural disaster edition. Industrial disaster is what they call these. Yeah, human caused. In fact, from what I saw, what we're going to talk about today, the main thing we're talking about today is the largest industrial disaster in United States history still. Oh, still, huh? Yes. Wow. What, 70, almost 75 years on. Man, it's sad. This is a big one. Yeah. Everything about this was really big, but in basically all the wrong ways. Right. We're going to talk today about a disaster called the Texas City Explosion. And sadly, you might say, which one?

1:41Because there's been multiple massive explosions in Texas City. One of the reasons why is because Texas City has made a name for itself as one of the premier petrochemical ports in the United States and indeed possibly the world. I think it was up until World War II, it was like the fourth largest port in Texas. But I think since World War II, it's grown even more. And I know for a little while there, BP had a refinery that was its most profitable oil refinery in the world, which is really saying something. I mean, that's a big deal. BP is an enormous company with multiple refineries. So, you know, for the biggest one, the most profitable one to be in Texas City, it kind of put Texas City on the map in some circles.

2:31Yeah, so Texas City is above the Gulf of Mexico. And like you said, it's a port town founded in the late 1800s by some Minnesota hunters. And they said, you know what? I think we can set up shop here. I think we can dig up a canal, set up a rail line. Yeah. We've got some really good deep water and we could be a good shipping port. I want to know how they, like what conversation led to that? Like what hunting trip ends up in you basically building a port town in a city that's about as far away from your home as you can get in the same country? Yeah. I mean, there were some real go-getters, I guess.

3:07Yeah, I guess so. They couldn't just relax and kill animals. Right. God. So that's what happened to Texas City. I mean, that's how it was kind of founded. And it was, like, think refineries, think warehouses and chemical plants. World War II comes around. And the military, of course, says, well, we'll be sort of controlling this area for a while because it's a pretty valuable port for us. and we're going to ship munitions in and out of here. World War II comes and goes. And then after the war, about a year and a half after the war, it is run by civilians again. And let's just say that it was a little more of a relaxed scene than it was when the military was running the show.

3:53Yeah, the military ran it like a tight ship basically. And, yeah, there's just a big difference between when the military is running a port and when a port's run by just a whole bunch of different private companies. You know what I'm saying? Minnesota hunters. Exactly. So that's not to say it was just some loosey-goosey place or anything like that, but just comparatively speaking. And one of the other things that Texas City had going against it on the morning of April 16, 1947, is that there weren't really a lot of standards and regulations for handling chemicals and that we didn't have an enormous grasp on just how chemicals worked at that time.

4:38And so all of these things kind of came together, this kind of slightly lax oversight and just kind of much more relaxed attitude toward cargo. And then a lack of awareness about just what kind of dangers different cargos pose, just kind of set things up to take a bad turn. Yeah, so on the morning of April 16th, there were three ships docked in the port. There was most notably the SS Grand Camp, which was a military ship at one point. But I think we gave it to France as like, hey, sorry, Europe is kind of destroyed. Why don't you take this ship and just use it for whatever you want to do? And it was converted to a cargo ship.

5:25Yeah. which it was on the day of April 16th. And it was beside the SS High Flyer, and that was beside the third one named after somebody. What was that one? The Robert Keene or the William Keene? Oh, wait a minute. Which one was it? Well, it was the Wilson B. Keene, even better. Right, the Billy Keene, as they called it. Yeah, and I believe all three of those were Liberty ships, right? Yeah, they were World War II ships, and they were, I think the SS High Flyer was being fixed at the time but was still loaded down with stuff as was the Grand Camp and we'll sort of detail what was in the cargo because it's all very, very key.

6:08Yeah, it's really important. So for five days leading up to April 16th, Steve Doors, I think that's how you say it, but basically Dock Hands. I don't know why you wouldn't just say Dock Hand, you know. But Steve Doors, man, I hope I'm saying that correctly, Chuck. They had loaded up the Grand Camp with 2 ,300 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. And these were in 100-pound paper sacks, akin to the kind of sacks that you would buy like Portland cement in these days, right? Yeah. There were some other cargo, sisal twine, peanuts. There was some machinery. There was some cotton. There was 16 cases of ammunition, I think, like for small arms ammunition.

6:52but for the most part it was a lot of ammonium nitrate and the same went for the ss high flyer too which as you said was in the next berth it was loaded with a thousand tons of ammonium nitrate and then also very crucially two thousand tons of sulfur and all these were also in those same hundred pound paper bags so at the time like i was saying people didn't realize like this is This is a big deal that there was that much ammonium nitrate just sitting around in this port at that time. Yeah, it's a crystal-like solid. It's white. A lot of times it's used for nitrogen, for agricultural fertilizer.

7:34But if you combine it with fuel oils, it can be very explosive and actually used for that, for like mining and construction and stuff like that. But it's not like, you know, if you tap the side of the bag, it's going to explode. It's pretty safe as long as it's all in the up and up and it's being stored properly. But if it starts to absorb moisture, then it's sort of like Portland cement again. It's just going to harden to a block. Right. And then if that thing is in a solid block, it's going to be just a little bit more volatile and a little bit more dangerous if ignited. Yeah, I mean, it's not even considered flammable as far as I know.

8:13And certainly in 1947, it wasn't considered flammable because if you walked up to some of this ammonium nitrate, these pellets, and just held a lighter to them, they wouldn't catch fire. That's not really what they do. What they do is they oxidize things. They basically create free radicals, like we talked about in the free radical episode, which sets off like a chain reaction. And because they oxidize, They concentrate and condense and produce basically oxygen where it wasn't otherwise present. When that is combined with the fire, it makes a big time fire. So that's bad enough, right? Like if you set them off, like it'll combust or it'll help something else combust more efficiently and more at a higher temperature.

9:00But the problem, the big problem with ammonium nitrate is there is a point where it can reach a high enough heat that it itself decays and degrades. And when that happens, it splits into two gases, nitrous oxide and water vapor, which you're like, well, that's great. You know, you just get super duper high off of one and the other one just makes you a little moist. Maybe so, maybe so in small enough amounts. But when this happens in a large enough amount, especially when this ammonium nitrate is in one big melted block, the chain reaction can happen much more efficiently. And when those gases are produced, when the thing decays and separates, they expand really quickly.

9:46And that produces an explosion. and the forces, the energy that's released from an explosion of ammonium nitrate decaying and converting into nitrous oxide and water vapor is monumental. Like compared to atomic bomb blasts, basically, if you have enough of it, say 2 ,300 tons and 1 ,000 tons and a couple of ships just sitting in port. All right. That's a great place for a cliffhanger, I think. I think so too. All right. We'll be right back after this.

10:46All right. So this stuff, the cargo arrived by train to Texas City, and it was probably already heating up a little bit on this train and maybe already getting to the point where it was a little, I don't know about unstable, but volatile at least. And it gets transferred to the ship. It continues to sort of heat up. And the crew and everything, like you said, there wasn't a lot of awareness about kind of anything like this at the time. So to them, it was just another cargo hold. They might have said, like, you know, be careful with this stuff, guys, or maybe not even that. Yeah. But they definitely didn't know, like, heat bad for this stuff.

11:27Yeah, they said, you owe me two bucks from lunch yesterday. That's what they said when they were loading this up. So around 8 a.m. in the morning, these workers there started noticing that there was smoke and vapors coming out of the ship. So there was some kind of a fire going on. No one knew how it started or what happened. There are some people anecdotally that say it was a cigarette. Which it could have been. It could have been. That wasn't in the official report, which also wouldn't be surprising. Well, what I saw later on, Chuck, that the fact that these things were in those paper sacks, that if they were heating up, they were just going to continue to heat up being packed tightly in the hold of this unventilated ship.

12:10They were just going to get warmer and warmer. And it's possible that the ammonium nitrate caused the paper sack to combust, catch fire, spread to other paper sacks. And then you had a positive feedback loop where it just kept getting – the fire kept getting bigger and bigger. And crucially, very important, hotter and hotter. Right. So the captain sees this happening. There are people kind of pouring in and looking around at what's going on. The captain says, batten down these hatches, pull these tarps over them, and start pumping steam in there, which apparently was a method at the time to put out a fire on a ship when you didn't want to ruin the cargo, as opposed to just blasting it with a fire hose, which would cause all this stuff to just brick up like Portland cement.

12:58He starts pumping steam in there, and that just started heating. Everyone knows steam is going to heat stuff up, so that just started, and the moisture. made a bad situation a lot worse really quickly. Yeah, I get the impression that had the captain, his name was Captain Charles de Guillabon, had he made the decision to just go ahead and let the cargo be ruined and have the fire put out with fire hoses, this all might never have happened. But it was, I mean, I understand where he was coming from. He didn't want to ruin the cargo if he didn't have to because steaming out a fire aboard a ship was an accepted firefighting technique.

13:37It works and it could conceivably save a lot of the cargo. So it's not like he just made this ridiculous, stupid mistake. It's just in hindsight, it was probably the decision that led to this catastrophe. Yeah, I mean, I think more than anything, it's like you said, it was the time when there was not much regulation and sort of in the dawning of the chemical age, people just didn't know. Right. And plus also at the time, Texas City had a volunteer fire department, which I would guess wouldn't have quite as much jurisdiction and could be told by a captain like, no, no, no, just go away. Like I'm going to handle this myself rather than being like, no, we're going to put the fire out on your ship.

14:21Yeah, that's a good point. So the steam is making things worse. It pumped into the holds and everything's heating up. Everything's getting moist. And like we said, moisture is no good for this stuff. And it did. It started to convert to these solid masses. And, you know, there's going to be gas releasing. And it's building up all this pressure because they had battened down the hatches and covered them with tarps. And so much so that it blew these hatch covers off at about 830 in the morning. That's crazy. Just that alone would have been spectacular. And I'm sure it was. But when those hatches blew off, all the smoke that had been kind of stuck in the hole inside the ship started billowing out.

15:03And the thing apparently about ammonium nitrate burning is it produces really kind of mesmerizing colored smoke from one of the witnesses. It was apparently salmon, orange, and purple. Oh, wow. And so the smoke coming out of it started to attract people, like onlookers, who were like, what's going on? I want to go see this giant weird fire that's going on down at the port. And something like 300 people, including entire families, kids from the local school came over. All sorts of people just kind of stopped what they were doing and came to watch this weird fire at the port. And apparently KGBC out of Galveston, which is just 10 miles down the coast out in the Gulf of Mexico, So they were warning people to stay away, but apparently that just alerted more people that there was something going on who went down to go check it out themselves.

15:58Yeah, so they knew that there was a big problem at this point. They did call the firefighters in and the tugboat to maybe try and get that thing out of there. And at this point, like you said, the heat was just so great that even a fire hose isn't going to do much. It's kind of just vaporizing when it hits it. Yeah, that's crazy. Because of the massive amounts of heat. and then you know this whole thing started at 8 at 8 30 is when the hatches uh blew and then at 9 12 the thing exploded and we're gonna kind of list through a pretty horrifying list of um of impacts from like distances like a seismograph in denver colorado picked up this explosion yeah um and this is again in the southern most part of texas right yeah like they felt it in louisiana you know like 3 000 foot fire bombs and cargo flying up in the air so yeah the the enormous amount of energy that i was talking about that was released by this 2300 tons of ammonium nitrate um in retrospect i think has been the i saw uh compared to a 2.7 kiloton blast yeah which would put this blast of this ship blowing up at somewhere on the order of about one-third, no, I'm sorry, one-fifth of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb, which just completely leveled that city.

17:24This was about a fifth that size. So it was still a really substantial, enormous blast. And one of the first effects it had is that it blew this Liberty ship, this huge World War II-era cargo ship, a couple thousand feet into the air in multiple pieces to just shower out downward as hot metal shrapnel onto the surrounding city. That's not accounting for the shrapnel that immediately blew outward as those gases expanded right into all of those onlookers and the people who were fighting the fire around the port. Yeah, they had a couple of two-ton anchors. One of those went about a mile and a half away in the air.

18:08Like we said, you could feel it in Louisiana. There was a Monsanto and a Union Carbide, two different chemical plants kind of right beside it. They were just flattened, basically just not even there anymore. Yeah, I saw that one of the warehouses, Warehouse Zero at the port, which is I think the one that was closest to the ship. This historian from Houston, I think, said that it just disappeared. Like it was just gone. Like it wasn't there any longer. Like the word disintegrate works in a lot of the instances when you're describing what happened to a lot of the structures and people who were around this blast.

18:43Well, yeah. I mean, that's the obvious thing. You know, there were hundreds of onlookers. There were people that work there. There were all 28 members of the fire department. They were all killed basically instantly. Anyone within that zone was killed instantly. Some people, like you said, just not even able to recover enough body parts to identify humans at that point. Yeah, that proved to be a real problem. So, like, first of all, the fact that the entire fire department, apparently there was one survivor from the fire department, but he was out of town at the time. That's why he survived. But the whole fire department and all of their equipment was immediately wiped out.

19:21One of the problems was with an explosion like this in a place like this is that it ruptures lines and pipes and all of those petrochemicals that are being refined suddenly catch fire. So now you have these out of control fires in the buildings and structures that are left standing. And you no longer have a fire department or any fire equipment to put it out for a little while. So the immediate impact outside of the blast was also the fires that were lit just right after this too. Well, I mean, you've got the metal shrapnel, but then you've also, remember, there were peanuts and twine and cotton and all this stuff.

20:01So these are like fireballs being launched, basically starting fires all over the place. It wasn't just in the immediate area. And like you said, because the fire department was then out of commission, that's real trouble. Yeah, so it took a little while for more aid to show up. But apparently this explosion was so bad and the catastrophe was so great. The Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Marines, Texas National Guard, and then firefighters from surrounding cities all came out to help. Man. And this wasn't just like putting this chemical fire out, but also like trying to, you know, rescue people from rubble.

20:40Like there's really a lot that we could sit here and say. But if you have a computer in front of you, like just look up pictures from the Texas City explosion of 1947. It's just unreal what happened to like enormous steel buildings just turned into like twisted metal. And this is like, you know, the middle of a work day. So there were people trapped all over the place in this debris. So there was a huge rescue operation that had to start. But it was delayed because most of the people who were tasked with that kind of thing had all been killed in the initial blast. Yeah, so remember earlier we said that there were three ships there.

21:27This one blows up. And obviously, you know, it's a full-on like 9-11 scene at this point with just how chaotic it is. People are not noticing that right next door, the SS High Flyer also, remember, was loaded with this stuff and also with sulfur, which makes it become unstable. And this thing had been unlodged. I mean, I'm surprised. It's just the integrity of these ships is the only reason that those weren't just blown to bits, too. Like it was kind of right next to it and it was still intact at least. And it was blown from its moorings though and drifted over and kind of attached itself to the Wilson B.

22:09Keene, which was again in the slip next to it. And I think there were some crew members aboard in there that I guess were just protected by that thick steel, right? Yeah, from what I understand. And they were kind of still doing their thing. For a little while, and they were finally, because the high flyer caught fire as well, they were finally forced out by the smoke because this is some noxious, noxious smoke. This isn't, I mean, this isn't just like wood-burning smoke. This is some really bad chemical smoke that can mess you up. It's crazy that these sailors stayed aboard for an hour. But they're finally forced off a ship.

22:44But they tell people, like, hey, this is on fire. Everybody's like, have you seen the other problems we have over here? and the fire department just got basically vaporized. So the fire was allowed to continue on the high flyer for hours, hours and hours. Like that blast happened at 9, 12 a.m. And it wasn't until the afternoon that somebody else rediscovered the fire aboard the high flyer and started to kind of like raise the alarm about this. Still, this is such a chaotic scene that there wasn't anything immediately done about it. And it wasn't until 11 p.m. that they're finally like, oh, this is a bad jam because not only do we have a thousand tons, tons of ammonium nitrate aboard the high flyer, there's that sulfur you mentioned, Chuck.

23:33And like you said, it makes it even more unstable in that you know how ammonium nitrate oxidizes things? Sulfur is like food to that stuff. It oxidizes sulfur. It's just like piling on this oxidizing fuel to make the blast even more energetic. So it would be a really big problem if the high fire blew up. So they brought in some tugboats and a fireboat, I think, from Galveston and started to try to take it out of the berth to tug it out to sea to let it burn out or blow up or whatever it was going to do. But I guess it was stuck so fast that they couldn't get it out. Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, this thing was not, I guess, just sort of wedged in there from that first explosion.

24:23And I think they worked on it for a couple of hours. They started at about 11 p.m. And then it looks like by 1 a.m. they had stopped that process. And at 1.10, and this is now on April 17th, you know, early next morning, the high flyer exploded as well. And this was even more violent. The only, I mean, it's not a saving grace at all because everything was already leveled, but the only reason it didn't cause more death and more destruction, sadly, is because everything was already destroyed and most people were already dead. Yeah, and plus also they knew enough by this time that they needed to clear the area, that there wasn't anything they could do.

25:03So everybody who was working in the rescue operation was told to leave. So I don't know if there were any more deaths from the high flyer blowing up, But the problem was is that any fires that might have been put out were relit, and other structures that may have been spared from the initial blast were now leveled or caught fire or both. So it was a big problem that the high fire blew up as well. I think it sunk the Wilson Keene too, didn't it? It did. It sunk it. And it was, yeah, I can only imagine too also if you survive that first one to have another blast like that, Even when you were away from and you knew was coming would just do something to the nerves that would be really difficult to recover from.

25:47Yeah, for sure. You want to take a break? Yeah, we'll take a little break and we'll talk about sort of the results of the devastation and a couple of other incidents right after this.

26:24Okay, so Chuck, one thing that we didn't say was that the initial explosion by the grand camp created like a 15-foot tidal wave that washed inland. And people died almost in creative ways in this disaster. And one of those ways was those petrochemicals. I think there was a molasses refinery that started to get mixed in that kept the petrochemicals burning in the water when it mixed with them. When this tidal wave blew out, when it blew in, I'm sorry, it was on fire. So it actually caught people on fire. It caught people on fire on the way back out to sea, and people who'd survived the initial blast were actually swept out and drowned from this too.

27:14There were people who died in airplanes that had come around to kind of circle the area and were blown out of the sky. There were people who died in buildings that collapsed. There were people who died from shrapnel falling out of the sky and killing them even though they were miles away. Like there were there was so much death and destruction that it's really difficult to get across what happened to this poor little port city that hadn't done anything to anybody that just suddenly blew up. Yeah, in the end, the official death hole was close to 600, 581 people, 113 of which were just vaporized.

27:57No trace was ever found of 113 people. Casualties up to 5 ,000. The numbers kind of vary, but anywhere from 3 ,500 to 5 ,000. And, you know, Texas City was not a very big place. It was about 16 ,000 strong. So this was just devastating to the city and to the region. It took about a week to put out all these fires. and I think a full month plus to recover whatever bodies they could recover at that point. Yeah, the final body wasn't found until mid-May. There were people who were never, like you said, accounted for. The converse of that was true too. There were parts of people that were never identified.