Texas City Disaster

mining the archives

Last week, April 16 was the anniversary of the largest industrial accident in Texas and actually the United States.

In 1946, the SS Grandchamp filled with ammonium nitrate docked at Texas City. The ammonium nitrate was originally produced for ammunition but was no longer needed for blowing things up and the nitrogen was now needed for fertilizer.

A fire somehow got started in the hold and the 28 members of the Texas City fire department spent the morning working to contain it.

Local citizens came down to watch.

The fertilizer, as fertilizer tends to do, exploded. It was a HUGE explosion. It could be heard and felt 150 miles away. It obliterated the docks. It destroyed the Monsanto Chemical Company Plant and several refineries that had been built nearby.

573 died. 5000 at least were injured.

27 of the 28 volunteer firefighters died. The one that survived was in Alvin visiting a sick aunt and didn’t get the call to come to the docks.

That Texas City 1946 explosion is still the largest industrial accident in the United States.

Heroic efforts made to save the injured in Texas City. Over 1000 buildings were destroyed. Some people a mile away were speared by flying jagged pieces of wood, or decapitated by sheets of metal. It was devastating.

In the 80s, PHIT produced a small public service announcement on the Texas City disaster for the Center for Rural Studies, which later became the Texas Center for Policy Studies. Tani Adams created and, at the time, was directing that non-profit.

Tani Adams is a towering figure in the Texas push for environmental and labor sanity. In 1982, Tani Adams not only founded the Center for Rural Studies, which agitated and educated about environmental safety She also set up and directed five regional offices for Greenpeace in Latin America for 1988-94. In 1996, she was chosen to be the director of CIRMA (Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamerica) in Antigua, Guatemala. She went on to make that library one of the finest in Latin America.

The purpose of the PHIT public service piece on Texas City Center was to talk about the ongoing problems of chemical plants in Texas. It was part of the Texas Toxic Tour presentation, and the attempt to provide stricter pollution controls on chemical plants.

Here is the list of accidents and chemical spills rolling over the last minute of the program.

Freeport 1981

Los Fresnos 1983

Deer park. 1984

Eastland 1985

Belleville 1985 1987

Texas City 1969 1987

Houston 1980, 1986

PHIT wanted to do a larger documentary on the explosion. We had experience with documentaries of small towns and community history…see Boom times in Kilgore.

We interviewed a number of people. One of which was the Fire Chief in Texas City. As mentioned, 27 of the 28 volunteer firefighters in Texas City died in the explosion. After the explosion, Texas City poured money into the fire department. Texas City prided itself on having the best trained and most advanced fire department in the nation.

The Fire Chief mentioned in his interview that we weren’t asking the right questions.

We finally understood what he was talking when we closely read some newspaper interviews at the time. One person talked about wading ankle deep in benzene. Benzene is toxic. It is a human carcinogen and contributes mostly to leukemia.

Texas City could protect against fire and was well prepared. But chemical spills was accidental releases of toxic gases was not so easy to prevent and contain.

Texas City citizens probably experienced cancer problems over the years. The data doesn’t show up, and experts say there is no statistical link, but PHIT thinks that people moved away and the problems showed up later in other cities. See the PHIT article on Panna Maria and the uranium mining waste dump.

We also tracked down and interviewed Rita Carlson, a Texas City environmental citizen activist.

Rita Carlson was concerned about environmental safety. Texas City is a huge petrochemical refining center. Ms Carlson believed that the petrochemical industry was not paying close enough attention of environmental safety and that Texas City citizens were paying the price.

She had mapped out cancer clusters around the city.

But some of her neighbors were not happy with her. They felt she had “betrayed the companies that have fed and clothed them.”

She founded the Galveston County Environmental Division and got involved in RASH—Residents Against Siting Here—which successfully stopped a Hazardous Waster Incinerator being built in Texas City.

She ran Toxic Tours of Texas City.

She left Texas City in 1990. First, she discovered a tumor in her sinus cavity and then her kids starting having problems with their lymph glands. Enough was enough. They moved to Illinois.

People remember the Texas City Explosion. They remember the brave volunteer fireman who lost their lives battling the fire. They should also remember the brave citizen activists like Rita Carlson.

We should also restart the Toxic Tours of Texas.

P.S.

PHIT did not complete the Texas City Documentary. In those days, it took money to shoot and finalize documentaries. No one was willing to fund our grant applications. But all the interviews can be found in the Briscoe Center for American History where we have deposited our archives.