DISASTER: Pluperfect Hell

The morning sun shone warm and bright. It looked like another great day for the war-fat Gulf port town of Texas City, Tex.—"The Port of Opportunity." Stores were busy, prosperous people "howdy'd" one another in the streets. Down along the waterfront, $125 million worth of oil refineries, tin smelters and chemical plants labored mightily to assure Texas City's future. Down there too was the only small blot on the day—the French freighter Grandcamp, loaded with ammonium nitrate fertilizer and docked some 700 ft. from the great Monsanto Chemical Co. plant, was afire.

At first only the crew, the longshoremen and the local fire department troubled about the Grandcamp. But as the smoke rolled blacker, some 200 people gathered at the dock to watch. By 9 a.m., the fire fighters, who knew something about the explosive fury of nitrate, figured they had better move the ship out into Galveston Bay. Twelve minutes later it was too late.

In one tremendous thunderclap, the Grandcamp vanished. Hot steel screamed uptown. A flaming wall of oil-covered water rolled over the docks as the blast picked up a steel barge and flung it 100 yards inland. Two light planes that had been circling over the harbor plummeted down together with 300-lb. chunks of ship's steel. Then, in a splitting series of explosions (one of which flipped a fire truck on top of the beached barge), the Monsanto plant and most of the rest of the waterfront blew up.

Flame & Invisible Force. The next minutes were a vortex of sound, flame and rushing, invisible force. The bodies of the dock crowd, limbs and clothes torn off by the blast, were strewn for half a block. In the ruins of the Monsanto plant, buildings sagged slowly down on 800 workers. In adjacent refineries, gasoline and oil tanks shot up like rockets, walls fell, pipes curled up and writhed like snakes, and black and red fire licked greedily over the ground.

Uptown, a mile away, the manager of the White House department store was blown through the post office door. The invisible force smashed the doors and windows of the First State Bank and scattered money all over the floor. It tossed Mrs. Tena Lide out through a second-story window, twisted the steel roof beams of the auditorium, puffed in the roof and a wall of the Jewel Theater, knocked out the gas, light and water systems and pancaked rows of houses.

A telephone operator flashed neighboring Houston: "For God's sake, send the Red Cross. ..." A dazed young woman walked the streets with a dead child in her arms. Stunned people walked into the sides of buildings and cars, and on the waterfront, those heroic people who always turn up when men are dying died themselves while following cries from under the flaming wreckage. Trucks loaded with dead rumbled by and sound trucks bellowed warnings through the streets:

¶ The High Flyer, a nitrate-laden sister of the Grandcamp, was afire and might explode any minute.