The ship was carrying fertilizer, and the town came down to watch it burn

April 16, 1947. 8:00 a.m. / 29.3838° N, 94.9027° W / Pier O, the docks at Texas City, Texas.

Texas City ran on what came off the ships and what came out of the pipes. It sat on Galveston Bay, across the water from Galveston itself, and by the end of the war it had become a place where chemicals were made and loaded and shipped. Refineries, a Monsanto Chemical plant, tank farms, a tin smelter. The port was the reason for all of it. Men worked the docks, went home to small frame houses within sight of the stacks, and came back the next morning.

The fire department was volunteer. Men from the plants and the shops who kept their gear ready and answered the whistle. Everyone knew everyone.

In the spring of 1947 the docks were busy with a cargo that had a government behind it. Ammonium nitrate, produced at American ordnance plants that had spent the war making explosives and were now making fertilizer for a hungry Europe. It went out in paper bags, several plies thick, coated so it would not cake in humid weather. It was handled as agricultural freight. Longshoremen carried it on their shoulders. The bags were warm when they came off the rail cars, which was normal, and nobody thought about it much.

The French-flagged Liberty ship Grandcamp was tied at Pier O taking on that fertilizer, bound for France. She had already loaded other cargo, including small arms ammunition and machinery and sisal twine. The nitrate went into holds two and four. Loading went on for days.

On the morning of April 16, a longshoreman working in hold four saw smoke coming up between the bags. It was around eight o'clock. The men tried water first, then were told to stop, because water would ruin the cargo. The hatch covers went on and the steam smothering system was turned into the hold, which was the standard method for a cargo fire on a ship. Steam displaces oxygen. It also puts heat into a confined space.

The pressure built under the covers until the hatch blew. Smoke came out of the ship in a color people remembered afterward, an orange-yellow that hung over the slip and did not look like ordinary smoke. It was strange enough that people came to look at it. The morning was clear. Word moved along the waterfront that the French ship was on fire, and the docks filled with spectators. Children who had been let out of the schools nearby stood at the fence. People took pictures. The water in the slip near the hull began to boil.

The volunteer fire department turned out and ran hose to the pier. They were standing at the ship when it went.

At 9:12 in the morning the Grandcamp detonated. The blast was felt across the state line. Windows broke in Houston, forty miles up the ship channel. Two light aircraft that were circling above the harbor to look at the fire came apart in the air and fell. A wall of water came out of the slip and pushed a steel barge up onto the ground. The ship's anchor, a piece of iron weighing tons, was thrown across the town and buried itself in the earth. Steel plate from the hull came down over a wide area, burning, and it came down on tank farms.

Everyone standing on the pier was killed. The volunteer fire department was killed almost to a man, along with their equipment. Texas City lost its ability to fight the fires that started in the next ten seconds.

The Monsanto plant sat directly across the slip. The blast took the buildings down on the shift working inside them. Fires spread through the tank farms and the refinery lines. In the residential streets, roofs lifted and ceilings came down on people eating breakfast. Debris fell in yards. Fuel from broken tanks ran and burned.

Help came from everywhere it could come from. Galveston sent boats. The Red Cross and the Army and units from nearby bases moved in. Doctors set up in whatever buildings were still standing. The high school gymnasium became a morgue, and then it was not big enough, and a warehouse became the morgue. Men worked all day pulling people out and putting fires down, and while they did that, there was another ship in the harbor.

The High Flyer was berthed in the same slip, damaged by the blast and drifting against another vessel. She was carrying sulfur and about a thousand tons of the same ammonium nitrate. She had begun to burn. Tugs tried to pull her out into open water during the afternoon and evening and could not get her free.

At about one o'clock in the morning on April 17, the High Flyer exploded. The second blast finished what was left of the dock area and took the ship berthed alongside her with it. It came in the dark, sixteen hours after the first one, on a town that had spent the day carrying its own dead.

The fires burned for days. Oil storage kept going after everything else was out.

The dead were counted at roughly 581, and that number has never been exact, because the port drew transient labor and nobody knew for certain how many men were working the pier that morning or how many spectators had walked down to see the smoke. Thousands were injured. A third of the town's houses were condemned. Whole families were gone. Some bodies were never recovered in any identifiable form, and sixty-three people who were recovered could not be identified at all.

Those sixty-three were buried together in a memorial cemetery north of town, in a row of identical graves.

The survivors and the families of the dead sued the United States government. The theory was direct: the fertilizer was manufactured under a federal program, at government-owned plants, to a government specification, with government decisions about its coating, its bagging, its labeling, and how it was to be shipped. The suits were consolidated and went forward under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which Congress had passed the year before the explosion to allow citizens to sue the government for negligence.

The lead case was Dalehite v. United States. A federal district court found for the plaintiffs. The court of appeals reversed. In 1953 the Supreme Court affirmed the reversal and held that the government could not be sued, because the decisions behind the fertilizer program were policy decisions, and the Tort Claims Act contained an exception for the exercise of a discretionary function. The specification, the coating, the bagging, the shipping plan: all of it fell inside that exception. The claim failed not because the government had acted carefully but because the question of whether it had acted carefully could not be reached.

In 1955, Congress passed a private relief act to pay the Texas City claimants. Payments were capped per claim. The money went out to survivors and to families, eight years after the fact, as an act of legislative grace rather than as a judgment.

The industry practices changed afterward. Ammonium nitrate handling was rewritten. Fertilizer of that type stopped being treated as ordinary agricultural freight, and the standards for storing it, bagging it, and loading it onto ships were tightened. Texas City rebuilt its fire department and became a place with a professional one.

The town is still there and the plants are still there, bigger than they were. The port still moves chemicals. On the anniversary each April, there is a service.

The Grandcamp's anchor was dug out of the crater where it landed and set in concrete in a small park, pointing up, with the names of the dead nearby. It is about two miles from where the ship was tied.