DISASTER: Pluperfect Hell

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¶ The butane tanks were about to blow up and poison gases would be released. Planeloads of Plasma. An emergency hospital was set up in the City Hall as the Red Cross, Salvation Army, doctors, nurses, Texas Rangers with pearl-handled revolvers, planeloads of plasma and mobile kitchens began to arrive. The windowless high school gymnasium was swept clean—it would do for a morgue while the embalmers worked for hours, foot-deep in blood in the McGar garage. Now & again, they turned their backs on the corpses and slugged down hot coffee.

Outside was chaos and the incongruities inseparable from disaster. A terrier bitch whelped beside a dazed crowd at the foot of the memorial to Texas City's World War II dead. A Negro, suffering from concussion after being blown off the dock into the bay, swam back, walked to his blasted home, started patching it with hammer and nails. One man emerged from the rubble of the Texas Terminal Railway Building carrying $10 million in insurance policies in a bedsheet. He turned them over to the police. After dark, the inevitable looters worked the ruins.

By midnight, some of the people who had fled Texas City began to drift back. Some ignored police warnings that the waterfront was "pluperfect hell" and went down to help. Hundreds of grimy, gas-masked men, stupid with fatigue, still labored there—probing for severed legs, torsos, heads, in the red glow of the unquenchable fire. Sometimes squads of rescuers staggered for cover when a change of wind whipped the .blistering heat around. Among them was Father William Roach, of St. Mary's Catholic Church. Father Roach died with his rescue squad when, at 1:11 a.m., the High Flyer mushroomed like the Bikini bomb.

Primitive Terror. The High Flyer explosion, which was recorded by a seismograph in Denver, did more than sink a neighboring freighter and rake the remains of Texas City. It stirred a primitive terror. A wild evacuation jammed the roads out of town.

By morning, the people left in Texas City tried to count their dead. There were 200 bodies in the gym. They lay in blanketed rows, each body tagged with a yellow identification slip.* The smell of smoke and blood hung thick over relatives bending to look at the tags. Occasionally someone whimpered, or fainted, or turned woodenly and walked out. One young woman begged to be admitted out of turn to find her young husband. "We only been married a month," she explained. Another in slacks stepped challengingly up to a guard. "He ain't here," she snapped. Still another looked blankly at the face of a corpse, but screamed when she saw its feet. The night before, she had painted her husband's toenails with red fingernail polish.

What had caused the blast? The Coast Guard would say nothing, except that seamen, who had not been warned of the danger of nitrate cargoes (see SCIENCE), had been smoking on board the Grandcamp.

As for the price, by week's end there were 575 estimated dead, 3,000 injured, 295 missing. Property damage was incalculable, although insurance companies prepared to pay a minimum of $50 million in claims. The homes, the stores, the restaurants, the movies—whole parking lots full of cars—all were ruined or badly damaged.