The Explosion: 50 Years Later, Texas City Still Remembers

'Texas City just blew up'

By STEVE OLAFSON Houston Chronicle

TEXAS CITY - On the morning of April 16, 1947, shortly after 8 a.m., the hatch on the No. 4 hold of the French ship the S.S. Grandcamp was opened so that stevedores could resume loading a shipment of fertilizer bound for Europe.

It was the beginning of a beautiful, cool day, a breeze was coming out of the north, and Texas City was at work again.

Much of the rest of the country, still in the grip of a postwar recession, couldn't say that, but Texas City was different.

Along the waterfront, there was plenty of work for the town's longshoremen, and next to the wharf stood a hissing, steaming landscape of chemical plants and oil refineries that provided steady, good-paying jobs for much of the town.

With a population of 18,000, Texas City was nothing less than a boomtown, a place the hometown newspaper declared with every edition to be "the port of opportunity - the heart of the greatest industrial development of the South."

If anyone complained about the smell, they were told it was the smell of money and that they'd soon grow accustomed to it.

Occasional fires and explosions were part of the equation. They had, in effect, come to be treated by the townspeople as a source of public theater. If lightning struck an oil storage tank to spark a fire, a crowd would gather to watch it burn. It was like going to the picture show.

The ship fire on April 16, 1947, was much the same, only better. No one in town had seen one quite like it. It was the color of the smoke that caught their eyes. Some called it a peach color, some called it reddish orange. Many said it was pretty.

The fire was coming from the Grandcamp.

Berthed at Pier O, the ship already was loaded with oil-field machinery, drill stems, peanuts, sisal twine and small-arms ammunition. At Texas City, it was to be loaded primarily with ammonium nitrate, a crystalline powder that in peacetime was an excellent source of nitrogen for crops. In wartime, the substance was combined with TNT to make a bursting charge in demolition bombs.

When the small fire inside the Grandcamp could not be doused with jugs of drinking water or a portable extinguisher, an order was given to batten down the ship's hatches and cover them with tarpaulins.

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The Grandcamp's fire-smothering steam system was activated to keep the cargo from being damaged by water. But instead of killing the fire, the heat and pressure started decomposition of the ammonium nitrate fertilizer and produced combustible gas. The ship's hatch covers eventually blew off, sending the smoke skyward.

By 8:45 a.m., 27 members of the Texas City Volunteer Fire Department were spraying water on the Grandcamp's deck. The ship was so hot that the water from the fire hoses vaporized.

Predictably, a crowd began gathering to watch the unusual smoke that formed above the port.

"Hey, let's go see it," someone said at a gym class at Central High School, the town's white high school.

Kids cut class and ran down to the wharves to watch.

In the southside neighborhoods closest to the city's industries, where Texas City's blacks and Mexican-Americans lived, people gathered along the edge of a fire wall to view the smoke.

The sight was no less enticing to the men and women who worked in the town's petrochemical industries. At the Republic Oil Co. refinery, the chief of security was taking carloads of people to the docks to watch the fire. The refinery manager, assistant manager, personnel director, laboratory manager and transportation director all ran outside to catch rides.

The decision to cease work along the waterfront was made after it became clear the fire inside the Grandcamp could not be controlled.

Ceary Johnson, a 37-year-old longshoreman who was unloading rail cars that day, didn't bother to stop and gawk when the call to quit working went out.

While his colleagues milled around nearby warehouses to watch the fire, Johnson decided to get a cup of coffee. As he walked to a nearby cafe, he passed Father William Roach, a well-known Catholic priest in town, and Mike Mikeska, the head of the Texas City Terminal Railway Co., which operated the port. The two men were speaking in earnest tones about towing the burning ship away from the docks if the fire grew worse.

Another longshoreman, George Sanders, also had stopped his work loading flour on the freighter Wilson B. Keene, moored in a slip just south of the burning Grandcamp.

Sanders, 21, had worked on the Grandcamp the day before, and instead of going home he stopped to watch the fire at the end of the slip. He stepped up on a small fence to get a better look over a barge that partially blocked his view. A boy he knew walked up to watch.

Nearby, in a building at the Monsanto Chemical Co., people kept walking into the drafting room that had a window which afforded an ideal view of the ship fire.

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It seemed to Mary Hunter, a secretary to the head engineer at Monsanto, that the smoke billowing into the air was keeping everyone from settling down to work. Someone had brought doughnuts to the office, as a further distraction. Hunter, who had skipped breakfast, told a co- worker they should share a doughnut, and as she broke one in half, it happened. The fire on the ship, which had sent such pretty smoke into the sky moments before, exploded at 9:12 a.m.

The two longshoremen, Johnson and Sanders, were swept up in a huge tidal wave that was lifted out of the bayside docks. The water rolled them over and over, pulling them down each time they tried to catch their breath, until finally the onrushing tide slowed and caught itself before rolling in the other direction, back into the bay. Both men had been carried 100 feet by the wave, and the sky looked as if it were on fire. Johnson, with only rags left on him, thought it was the end of the world. He thought about Bible scripture that said what once was destroyed by water would now be destroyed by fire. Sanders looked up to find himself by the local molasses company, his hair caked with the sticky product and shell from the ground. The boy who had been standing next to him at the fence was gone.

At Monsanto, Mary Hunter was thrown behind a desk. From the ground floor of the three-story building, she could look up and see sky each time she awoke from unconsciousness.

"Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou . . ." she said aloud each time she awoke.

She was a Methodist, but she had Catholic friends.

Hunter had thrown her right arm in front of her face just before a shower of glass, insulation and debris cut her down. Now the arm looked like raw hamburger.

A co-worker carried her out of the building, but disappeared after putting her in a car whose windows and doors had been blown out. Lying alone, she told herself that she would bleed to death if she didn't get out.

"Mister, will you help me?" she asked a man who hobbled by.

"We'll help each other," he replied.

They made their way across an open field while fire and explosions raged behind them.

At the Republic refinery, the blast ripped off the headset of Doris Sherron, the company's 20- year-old receptionist and switchboard operator. The concrete floor of the two-story building seemed to roll back and forth like a ship in heavy seas.

She ran with the crowd of people that rushed out of the building and jumped into a car that was leaving the refinery, then persuaded the driver to take her back to the refinery's main building. She was worried that without a switchboard operator, no one in the refinery would be able to use the telephones. She didn't realize that most telephone lines in the area were down. No one was completely sure what had happened.

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At Texas City Hospital, a small 20-bed clinic on Sixth Street, receptionist Lois Castanie thought an oxygen tank had exploded in the operating room, where doctors were performing a tonsillectomy.

Within minutes, though, workers from Texas National Bank next door began rushing into the hospital. They all had cuts.

"Something terrible's happened. All the windows blew out in the bank," one of them said. Within 45 minutes, people covered in oil and molasses began staggering into the hospital. The halls of the small facility were soon packed.

On one of the few working lines, Castanie phoned Carbide and Carbon Chemical Corp., now Union Carbide Corp., where her husband, Roland, was working.

They needed help, she told him.

The injured had broken arms and legs. Some had feet that barely remained attached to their legs.

Roland Castanie had seen much worse in World War II, serving in the Navy at Normandy. But it was still a shock.

Those caught in the tidal wave were shivering cold. When the supply of blankets was exhausted, curtains were taken down from the windows to wrap around patients to keep them from going into shock.

The seriously injured were injected with a half syringe of morphine.

Roland Castanie worked quickly, giving the injections to patients pointed out by the doctors and placing a sign on them noting the time of their injection and the dosage. He bent down to one woman, telling her, "I'm going to give you a shot and put you in an ambulance."

She rolled over and said, "Don't you recognize me?" It was Mary Hunter, the Monsanto secretary, a close friend he and his wife had socialized with practically every weekend. But he didn't recognize her. Her face was a white mask, a result of asbestos and plaster that had dropped from the ceiling and coated her when the building at the plant collapsed. The red streaks that soaked through the ghostly mask were small rivulets of blood.

Hunter's husband, Randy, had been by the hospital three different times looking for his wife, but Castanie had turned him away, saying he hadn't seen her.

From four miles away, the first flash of light from the explosion made Ken DeMaet and a co- worker, Red Murff, look up from their work at Carbide.

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The two men stood in awe as the dirty orange cloud that rose into the sky took the shape of a mushroom, by then a well-recognized shape of the Nuclear Age.

"Red, we're at war. The Russians have dropped a damn A-bomb on us," DeMaet, 21, told his friend.

"Yeah, I guess we are," answered Murff.

The first concussion wave that hit them broke windows, knocked barrels over and seemed to ripple the ground.

The explosion had been heard as far as 150 miles away. The mushroom cloud rose 2,000 feet.

Pieces of the Grandcamp were hurled several thousand feet in the air. Some of the heavy debris landed on pipelines and storage tanks, igniting secondary explosions. Other pieces landed on houses and people.

Hundreds were killed instantly: the curious bystanders, the ship's crew, the town's entire volunteer firefighter corps, save for one volunteer who was making deliveries on his beer route near Kemah.

The Grandcamp's 1.5 ton anchor was flung two miles and was embedded 10 feet into the ground at the Pan American refinery.

Pieces of the sisal twine aboard the ship were shot into the air, only to float gently back to the ground, the coils resembling blazing worms as they twisted back to earth.

Instinctively, people ran, heading either north through the commercial downtown area or west toward La Marque.

Ignacio Hernandez, a 5-year-old who lived at Third Street and Third Avenue South, began running with the crowd headed north.

Glass blown out of storefront windows littered the streets and sidewalks. He was barefoot, but his mother kept yelling at him to run each time he stopped, so he kept running. He stopped momentarily outside a dime store to pick up a toy that had been blown out onto the street, then thought better of it and kept running north. On the sidewalk in front of a jewelry store lay diamond rings, bracelets and watches that had been jarred out of their display cases, but no one stopped.

Hernandez couldn't tell white people from black people. Everyone seemed to be covered in oil or molasses, or both.

"The world is coming to an end!" a woman wailed.

That notion occurred to more than one person in Texas City.

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Another 5-year-old, Wiletta Mayes Williams, had been walking to kindergarten with a group of classmates when the explosion occurred.

They all broke and ran.

She reached for her brother's hand, but found a classmate's instead, and for a moment she saw the legs of a woman running next to her, only to look up when the woman's feet appeared to slow and stumble. The youth saw that the woman had been decapitated.

"Judgment Day! It's Judgment Day," screamed some of the children.

She stopped running briefly and considered that. If it's Judgment Day, she asked herself, why are we running? In one direction there was blue, clear sky. In the other, a roiling wave of black filled the air. She headed for the clear sky.

"Texas City just blew up," someone told Frank Simpson, an 18-year-old cadet at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, now Texas A&M University.

Simpson, like everyone else outside Texas City, heard the news either from radio or from someone who had heard it on the radio.

The first broadcast bulletins reported that the downtown area had been obliterated. Unable to get through by phone to check on his parents, he rented a jeep that was still painted U.S. Army green to get home.

Before he left College Station, the A&M commandant summoned him to his office. "Son," he said, "from what I understand you better carry a gas mask with you, 'cause there's no telling what's down there."

With that, he handed Simpson two gas masks -- one for himself and one for a fellow student from Galveston who asked to ride with him.

The gas masks and the jeep paved the way to Texas City for the two students, both dressed in their Corps uniforms.

At the first roadblock, a guard looked in the back seat, saw the gas masks and motioned the young cadets through without a word. At the next three checkpoints, Simpson slowed down and held up the gas masks as he made his way to Sixth Street and Texas Avenue.

His parents were OK even though the family house on 10th Avenue North, about two miles from the explosion, didn't have a window intact.

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At midafternoon, rumors of a potential second explosion were sweeping the town. With the sky filled with black smoke from the burning ship and secondary fires in the city's refineries, it didn't seem far-fetched.

That night, his bedroom too wrecked by the blast for him to sleep in, his mother and father set up a cot for him to sleep on in the living room, and then debated whether to flee the town. "They're talking about a second ship going up, and we don't have any business staying here," his mother, Mary, a schoolteacher, argued.

His dad, Link, sales manager for a Chevrolet dealership, didn't see it that way. "Oh, it's not gonna happen. No reason for us to leave now. It's over."

When a second explosion erupted shortly after 1 a.m., he had a change of heart. When the house stopped shaking, the elder Simpson walked into the living room and announced to his son, "Get your pants on. Mama says we're leaving."

The second explosion, 16 hours after the Grandcamp blew up, came from another ship loaded with fertilizer.

The High Flyer, its turbines down for repairs, had been loaded with 961 tons of ammonium nitrate Ñ slightly more than what exploded on the Grandcamp. The vessel had been torn from its moorings by the first explosion and had drifted across its slip and come to rest against the Wilson B. Keene.

The Grandcamp explosion had blown the hatches off the High Flyer, but no fire aboard the vessel had been detected. The only damage appeared to be a hole in the deck the size of a dinner plate. Despite the absence of fire, the ship's crew was ordered off the vessel after fumes from its cargo of sulfur proved too powerful.

When word reached city officials that ammonium nitrate was aboard the High Flyer, orders were given to tow the ship away from port. But the ship was stuck, probably on debris from the Grandcamp. Two tugs that tried to tow the vessel could not budge it.

When flames were spotted aboard the High Flyer, an alarm was sounded and the waterfront was cleared just before the ship blew up.

Radio listeners heard a live on-air report.

"The sky is filled with red! We are all hitting the deck!" reported Ben Kaplan of KTHT radio in Houston. In the background was the voice of radio engineer O.B. Johnson: "Stay on the ground. Stand by for shrapnel."

Looking out the upstairs windows of John Sealy Hospital in Galveston, dozens of people injured in the Grandcamp explosion cast their eyes north across Galveston Bay to see the sky lighted as if it were midday.

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The High Flyer ignited a string of secondary explosions equal to the Grandcamp catastrophe. Crude oil tanks were ignited, a grain elevator was destroyed, warehouses on the piers were set ablaze.

Loss of life was minimal compared with the first eruption because, no doubt, of the time of day and the evacuation.

The task of gathering the dead, though, was far from over.

McGar Motor Service, a garage, had been turned into a temporary morgue to keep the first bodies recovered.

When space ran out there, the floor of the high school gymnasium, once the scene of dances and basketball games, was used to store and display the corpses.

Each day, a sad parade of people filed through the gym looking for the bodies of loved ones.

In the days following the Grandcamp disaster, hundreds remained missing.

During the day, survivors wandered down to the dock area, looking for evidence of their missing family members. They picked up shoes, belt buckles and other personal articles on the ground, looking for clues, but many never found a body that could be put in the ground.

Other survivors wandered the streets, thinking perhaps their loved ones had amnesia and couldn't find the way home.

It was five days before the body of Marie McGrory's younger brother, Jack, was found aboard a barge with a piece of drill stem stuck through his torso. Her older brother identified him at the high school gymnasium.

At the funeral home where her brother's service was held, a mortician from Chicago who prepared the body warned the family that the Texas City disaster was a warning from the Almighty.

"The Lord has sent a message to you to change your way of living," he solemnly told McGrory and her family.

The mortician's admonition had the ring of truth to McGrory.

There was a lot of dancing, drinking and cigarette smoking in the Texas City of 1947, as well as a full complement of houses of ill repute for the seamen who passed through the port and anyone else who felt so inclined.

Indeed, five days after the Grandcamp explosion, Texas City still looked like an earthly vision of hell itself as fires continued to burn, filling the sky with black smoke.

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Many survivors were not so lucky in locating lost relatives. Some had to wait much longer, and some never quit waiting.

They checked the Texas City Sun newspaper each day, scanning the list of names it published along with descriptions of personal belongings found on the unidentified.

Georgybel LeGendre, a 21-year-old lab analyst at Monsanto, had survived the Grandcamp's explosion in good enough shape to drive the injured to hospitals in Galveston, but she couldn't find her father, George, who worked in a Monsanto warehouse that was destroyed.

During the ensuing days, she and her mother, Cariebelle, visited the morgues countless times.

At night, they were unable to sleep, so they'd drive around town.

Then, six weeks after the explosion, they noticed a description in the newspaper of an unidentified man who had been carrying a silver pocket watch and fob on his work pants.

"I have a feeling about this," Cariebelle said.

"I do too," answered her daughter.

Together, the women carried a belt buckle that complemented the pocket watch and fob that belonged to the patriarch of their family.

It was a match.

Then they checked a piece of the khaki pants the unidentified man had been wearing. The night before the explosion, Cariebelle had mended the fly on her husband's work pants, using pink thread because she couldn't find tan thread.

She found the pink thread on a small piece of the body's khaki pants, further verifying the identity of her 56-year-old husband.

The two women hugged.

"Well, let's go get my sister and tell her," Georgybel told her mother.

For a time, it seemed to the people of Texas City that all they did was go to funerals. The disaster had killed at least 581 and injured about 3,500. No one in the small town was unaffected.

The wail of sirens seemed never to cease because each time a body was uncovered an ambulance would be dispatched.

Those seriously injured faced their own private hell of rehabilitation.

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Mary Hunter, the secretary at Monsanto who was breaking a doughnut in two to share with a co- worker when the Grandcamp exploded, had her severely injured right arm sewn back up with glass still imbedded in the limb.

The glass, which contained lead, showed up in X-rays. For the next six years, surgeons continued to remove glass from her arm. About 10 years after the explosion, she felt a spot in her elbow and pulled out a 3/4 inch piece of glass with tweezers.

With the ulnar and median nerves in her upper arms severed, Hunter had to learn to become left- handed.

Her husband fashioned a pronged device that could be attached to the cupboard that enabled her to peel potatoes. Hanging laundry to dry became her most difficult task.

Today, at 72, Hunter still has limited use of her right arm and hand.

More difficult to handle was the unmitigated terror that seized her each time she saw a simple cloud in the sky.

Others had similar psychological problems.

Wiletta Mayes Williams, the little girl who heard cries of "Judgment Day" as she and her schoolmates fled the explosion, would run into her room and gather up her clothes each time she heard a siren.

She was determined not to be stuck with only one set of clothes when the next disaster struck. Each night before bed she prayed that Texas City wouldn't blow up again.

Other survivors reacted in unpredictable ways.

Jewel Robinson, a Monsanto employee, was known to her friends as a quiet, unassuming woman, but after the explosion her personality changed.

The change first manifested itself as she and her husband rode a bus back to Texas City a few days following the explosion. Seated near them was a woman who kept up an incessant and loud chatter.

The mild-mannered Robinson finally had enough. "Will you please shut your mouth? You're bothering me," she told the woman.

Robinson, now 82, said her friends told her that her more assertive personality lasted about a year before returning to normal.

For years after the disaster, a terrible stench hung over the area surrounding the Texas City waterfront, a smell of death and decay.

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It was at its worst when a heavy rain was followed by sunshine.

The grief felt by the survivors of those who lost loved ones remained even longer. Marie McGrory mourned for her brother Jack for years until one night a dream caused her to accept his death.

"You don't ever forget them, and you don't ever reach the point where you don't miss them either," said the 77-year-old woman. "The more you think about it the sadder you are, and the more you grieve for them. I grieved for Jack until one night I dreamt I saw this little shriveled-up man walking down the street. He was old and decrepit and he said, 'Hey, Sis, don't you recognize me?' It woke me up just like that, and I said I've got to quit this. I can't keep grieving for him, because I grieved for years."

Those who didn't lose loved ones were left to ponder why they managed to survive.

Ceary Johnson, the now-87-year-old longshoreman who survived the blast because he left the dock area to get a cup of coffee, can't put his finger on why he was spared but believes it was for a reason.

"The good Lord, he kept me here for some purpose. I was a coffee drinker, I wanted some coffee. That's what saved me."

His fellow longshoreman, George Sanders, believes his decision to climb partially up a fence to get a better view of the Grandcamp may have helped cushion him from the concussion of the explosion. But he views that as only part of the answer.

"God was with me," he says. "It wasn't my time. That's the only way I can see it."

NOTE: This article was taken from the Houston Chronicle web site. We would like to thank the Houston Chronicle for the use of this article for educational purposes.

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