Selects: The Texas City Disaster of 1947

In 1947 the port town of Texas City, Texas became the site of the largest industrial disaster in American history. An enormous explosion blew ships out of the water, created a tidal wave that flooded the town, and killed hundreds of people instantly. Find out all about it in this classic episode. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:02Josh Clark?

  Hey, everyone. It's me, Josh, and for this week's S Y S K Selects, I've chosen our episode on the Texas City disaster. In Texas, they do everything bigger, including industrial disasters. In this episode from March of 2021, we cover one of the biggest explosions in American history, made up of not one, but two huge blasts that leveled the refinery poor town of Texas City. I hope you find this one as riveting as we did.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:44Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there, and this is Stuff You Should Know.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  I was about to say natural disaster addition, but unnatural disaster addition.

• 2:01Josh Clark?

  Industrial disaster is what they call these.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, human caused.

• 2:05Josh Clark?

  In fact, from what I saw, what we're going to talk about today, the main thing we're talking about today is the largest industrial disaster in United States history, still.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Oh, still, huh?

• 2:17Josh Clark?

  Yes, what, 70, almost 75 years on.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Man, sad. This is a big one.

• 2:24Josh Clark?

  Yeah, everything about this was really big, but in basically all the wrong ways.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:30Josh Clark?

  We're gonna talk today about a disaster called the Texas City explosion. And sadly, you might say, which one? Because there's been multiple massive explosions in Texas City. And one of the reasons why is because Texas City is, has made a name for itself as one of the premier petrochemical ports in the United States and indeed possibly the world. I think it was, up until World War II, it was like the fourth largest port in Texas. But I think since World War II, it's grown even more. And I know for a little while there, BP had a refinery that was its most profitable oil refinery in the world,

• 3:14Josh Clark?

  which is really saying something. I mean, that's a big deal. BP is an enormous company with multiple refineries. So, you know, for the biggest one, the most profitable one to be in Texas City, it kind of put Texas City on the map in some circles.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Texas City is above the Gulf of Mexico. And like you said, it's a port town founded in the late 1800s by some Minnesota hunters. And they said, you know what? I think we can set up shop here. I think we can dig up a canal, set up a rail line.

• 3:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  We've got some really good deep water and we could be a good shipping port.

• 3:49Josh Clark?

  I want to know how they, like, what, what conversation led to that? Like, what hunting trip ends up in you basically building a port town in a city that's about as far away from your home as you can get in the same country?

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there were some real go-getters, I guess.

• 4:05Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I guess so. They couldn't just relax and kill animals.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  God, so that's what happened to Texas City. I mean, that's how it was kind of founded. And it was a, like, think refineries, think warehouses and chemical plants. World War II comes around. And the military, of course, says, well, we'll be sort of controlling this area for a while because it's a pretty valuable port for us. And we're going to ship munitions in and out of here. World War II comes and goes. And then after the war, about a year and a half after the war, it is run by civilians again. And let's just say that it was a little more of a relaxed scene than it was when the military was running the show.

• 4:51Josh Clark?

  Yeah, the military ran it like a tight ship, basically. And yeah, there's just a big difference between when the military is running a port and when a port's run by just a whole bunch of different private companies. You know what I'm saying?

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Minnesota hunters.

• 5:05Josh Clark?

  Exactly. So that's not to say it was just some loosey goosey place or anything like that, but just comparatively speaking. And one of the, one of the other things that Texas City had going against it on the morning of April 16th, 1947, is that there weren't really a lot of standards and regulations for handling chemicals. And that we didn't have an enormous grasp on just how chemicals worked at that time. And so all of this, all of these things kind of came together. This kind of slightly lax oversight and just kind of lack much more relaxed attitude toward cargo.

• 5:47Josh Clark?

  And then a lack of awareness about just what kind of dangers different cargoes pose just kind of set things up for, to take a bad turn.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so on the morning of April 16th, there were three ships docked in the port. There was most notably the SS Grand Camp, which was, it was a military ship at one point. But I think we gave it to France as like, hey, sorry, Europe is kind of destroyed. Why don't you take this ship and just use it for whatever you want to do? And it was converted to a cargo ship, which is, which it was on the day of April 16th. And it was beside the SS High Flyer. And that was beside the third one named after somebody. What was that one?

• 6:35Josh Clark?

  The Robert Keen or the William Keen?

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Oh, wait a minute. Which one was it?

• 6:41Josh Clark?

  Well, it was the Wilson B. Keen, even better.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Right, the Billy Keen, as they called it.

• 6:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and I believe all three of those were Liberty ships, right?

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, they were World War II ships. And they were, I think the SS High Flyer was being fixed at the time, but was still loaded down with stuff, as was the Grand Camp. And we'll sort of detail what was in the cargo because it's all very, very key.

• 7:05Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's really important. So for the five days leading up to April 16th, Steve Doors, I think that's how you say it, but basically dockhands. I don't know why you wouldn't just say dockhand, you know? But the Steve Doors, man, I hope I'm saying that correctly, Chuck. They had loaded up the Grand Camp with 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. And these were in 100-pound paper sacks akin to the kind of sacks that you would buy like Portland cement in these days, right?

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:39Josh Clark?

  There were some other cargoes, sisal twine, peanuts. There was some machinery, there was some cotton. There was 16 cases of ammunition, I think like for small arms ammunition. But for the most part, it was a lot of ammonium nitrate. And the same went for the SS High Flyer too, which, as you said, was in the next berth. It was loaded with 1,000 tons of ammonium nitrate. And then also, very crucially, 2,000 tons of sulfur. And all of these were also in those same 100-pound paper bags. So at the time, like I was saying, people didn't realize like this is, this is a, it was a big deal that there was that much ammonium nitrate just sitting around in this port at that time.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a, it's a crystal-like solid. It's white. A lot of times it's used for nitrogen, for agricultural fertilizer. But if you combine it with fuel oils, it can be very explosive and actually used for that, for like mining and construction and stuff like that. But it's not like. You know, if you tap the side of the bag, it's gonna explode. It's pretty safe as long as it's all in the open up and it's being stored properly. But if it starts to absorb moisture, then it's sort of like Portland cement again. It's just gonna harden to a block.

• 8:59Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  And then if that thing isn't a solid block, it's gonna be just a little bit more volatile and a little bit more dangerous if ignited.

• 9:07Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and I mean, like, it's not even considered flammable, as far as I know. And certainly in 1947, it wasn't considered flammable, because if you walked up to some of this ammonium nitrate, these pellets, and just held a lighter to them, they wouldn't catch fire. That's not really what they do. What they do is they oxidize things. They basically create free radicals, like we talked about in the free radical episode.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:30Josh Clark?

  Which sets off like a chain reaction. And because they oxidize, they concentrate and condense and produce basically oxygen, where it wasn't otherwise present. When that is combined with the fire, it makes a big time fire. So that's bad enough, right? Like, if you set them off, like, it'll combust, or it'll help something else combust more efficiently and more, at a higher temperature. But the problem, the big problem with ammonium nitrate, is there is a point where it can reach a high enough heat that it itself decays and degrades. And when that happens, it splits into two gases, nitrous oxide and water vapor, which

• 10:15Josh Clark?

  you're like, well, that's, that's great, you know? You just get super duper high off of one, and the other one just makes you a little moist. Maybe so, maybe so, in small enough amounts. But when this happens in a large enough amount, especially when this ammonium nitrate is in one big melted block, the chain reaction can happen much more efficiently. And when those gases are produced, when the thing decays and separates, they expand really quickly, and that produces an explosion. And the forces, the energy that's released from an explosion of ammonium nitrate decaying

• 10:53Josh Clark?

  and converting into nitrous oxide and water vapor is monumental, like, compared to atomic bomb blasts, basically, if you have enough of it, say, 2,300 tons and 1,000 tons and a couple of ships just sitting in port.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  All right, that's a great place for a cliffhanger, I think.

• 11:11Josh Clark?

  I think so, too.

• 11:13Speaker 02

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• 12:36Josh Clark?

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• 15:23Speaker 02

  All right, so this stuff, the cargo arrived by train to Texas City. And it was probably already heating up a little bit on this train.

• 15:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  And maybe already getting to the point where it was a little unstable, but volatile at least. And it gets transferred to the ship. It continues to sort of heat up. And the crew and everything, like you said, there wasn't a lot of awareness about kind of anything like this at the time. So to them, it was just another cargo hold. They might have said like, you know, be careful with this stuff, guys. Or maybe not even that.

• 15:59Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  But they definitely didn't know like heat bad for this stuff.

• 16:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah, they said, you owe me two bucks from lunch yesterday. That's what they said when they were loading this up.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  So around 8:00 AM in the morning, these workers there started noticing that there was smoke and vapors coming out of the ship. So there was some kind of a fire going on. No one knew how it started or what happened. There are some people anecdotally that say it was a cigarette.

• 16:26Josh Clark?

  Which it could have been.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Could have been. That wasn't in the official report, which also wouldn't be surprising.

• 16:32Josh Clark?

  Well, what I saw, I saw later on, Chuck, that the fact that these things were in those paper sacks, that if they were heating up, they were just going to continue to heat up, being packed tightly in the hold of this unventilated ship. They were just going to get warmer and warmer. And it's possible that the ammonium nitrate caused the paper sack to combust, catch fire, spread to other paper sacks. And then you had a positive heat back loop where it just kept getting, the fire kept getting bigger and bigger. And crucially, very important, hotter and hotter.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Right, so the captain sees this happening. There are people kind of pouring in and looking around at what's going on. The captain says, "Batten down these hatches, pull these tarps over them, and start pumping steam in there," which apparently was a method at the time to put out a fire on a ship when you didn't want to ruin the cargo, as opposed to just blasting it with a fire hose, which would cause all this stuff to just brick up like Portland cement. He starts pumping steam in there, and that just started heating. Everyone knows steam is going to heat stuff up, so that just started, and the moisture made a bad situation a lot worse really quickly.

• 17:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I get the impression that had the captain, his name was Captain Charles de Guéban, had he made the decision to just go ahead and let the cargo be ruined and have the fire put out with fire hoses, this all might never have happened. But it was, I mean, I understand where he was coming from. He didn't want to ruin the cargo if he didn't have to, because steaming out a fire aboard a ship was an accepted firefighting technique. It works, and it could conceivably save a lot of the cargo. So it's not like he just made this ridiculous, stupid mistake. It's just in hindsight, it was probably the decision that led to this catastrophe.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think more than anything, it's like you said, it was the time when there was not much regulation, and sort of in the dawning of the chemical age, people just didn't know.

• 18:38Josh Clark?

  Right. And plus, also, at the time, Texas City had a volunteer fire department, which I would guess wouldn't have quite as much jurisdiction and could be told by a captain, like, "No, no, no, just go away. Like, I'm going to handle this myself," rather than being like, "No, we're going to put the fire out on your ship."

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a good point. So the steam is making things worse.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  It pumped into the the holds and everything's heating up, everything's getting moist. And like we said, moisture is no good for this stuff. And it did, it started to convert to these solid masses and, you know, there's going to be gas releasing and it's building up all this pressure because they had battened down the hatches and covered them with tarps. And it so much so that it blew these hatch covers off at about 8:30 in the morning.

• 19:24Josh Clark?

  That's crazy, man. Just that alone would have been spectacular, and I'm sure it was. But when those hatches blew off, all the smoke that had been kind of stuck in the hole inside the ship started billowing out. And the thing apparently about ammonium nitrate burning is it produces really kind of mesmerizing colored smoke. From one of the witnesses, it was apparently salmon orange and purple.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 19:51Josh Clark?

  And so the smoke coming out of it started to attract people, like onlookers who were like, what's going on? I want to go see this giant weird fire that's going on down at the port. And something like 300 people, including entire families, kids from the local schools came over. All sorts of people just kind of stopped what they were doing and came to watch this weird fire at the port. And apparently KGBC out of Galveston, which is just 10 miles down the coast out in the Gulf of Mexico. They were warning people to stay away, but apparently that just alerted more people that there was something going on who went down to go check it out themselves.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they they knew that there was a big problem at this point. They did call the firefighters in and the tugboat to maybe try and get that thing out of there. And at this point, like you said, the heat was just so great that even a fire hose isn't going to do much. It's kind of just vaporizing when it hits it.

• 20:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  Because of the massive amounts of heat. And then, you know, this whole thing started at 8. At 8:30 is when the hatches blew. And then at 9:12, the thing exploded. And we're going to kind of list through a pretty horrifying list of

• 21:08Speaker 02

  of impacts from like distances, like a seismograph in Denver, Colorado picked up this explosion.

• 21:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 21:18Josh Clark?

  And this is, again, in the southernmost part of Texas, right?

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, like they felt it in Louisiana, you know, like 3,000-foot firebombs and cargo flying up in the air.

• 21:31Josh Clark?

  So, yeah, the enormous amount of energy that I was talking about that was released by this 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate. In retrospect, I think it's been the, I saw it compared to a 2.7 kiloton blast.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:47Josh Clark?

  Which would put this blast of this ship blowing up at somewhere on the order of about one-third, no, I'm sorry, one-fifth of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb, which just completely leveled that city. This was about a fifth that size. So it was still a really substantial, enormous blast. And one of the first effects it had is that it blew this Liberty ship, this huge World War II era cargo ship, a couple thousand feet into the air in multiple pieces to just shower out downward as hot metal shrapnel onto the surrounding city. And that's not accounting for the shrapnel that immediately blew outward as those gases

• 22:30Josh Clark?

  expand, expanded right into all of those onlookers and the people who were fighting the fire around the port.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was, they had a couple of two-ton anchors. One of those went about a mile and a half away in the air.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Like we said, you could feel it in Louisiana. There was a Monsanto and a Union Carbide, two different chemical plants kind of right beside it. They were just flattened, basically just not even there anymore.

• 22:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I saw that one of the warehouses, Warehouse Zero at the port, which was, I think, the one that was closest to the ship. This historian from Houston, I think, said that it just disappeared, like it was just gone, like it wasn't there any longer. Like, the word disintegrate works in a lot of the instances when you're describing what happened to a lot of the structures and people who were around this, this blast.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, that's the obvious thing. You know, there were hundreds of onlookers. There were people that worked there. There were all 28 members of the fire department. They were all killed basically instantly. Anyone within that zone was killed instantly. Some people, like you said, just not even able to recover enough body parts to identify humans at that point.

• 23:42Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that proved to be a real problem. So like, first of all, the fact that the entire fire department, apparently one, there was one survivor from the fire department, but he was out of town at the time. That's why he survived. But the whole fire department and all of their equipment was immediately wiped out. One of the problems was with an explosion like this in a place like this is that it ruptures lines and pipes and all of those petrochemicals that are being refined suddenly catch fire. So now you have these out of control fires in the buildings and structures that are left standing. And you no longer have a fire department or any fire equipment to put it out for a little while.

• 24:19Josh Clark?

  So the immediate impact outside of the blast was also the fires that were lit just right after this, too.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, you've got, you know, you've got the metal shrapnel, but then you've also, remember, there were peanuts and twine and cotton and all this stuff. So that's, these are like fireballs being launched, basically, starting fires all over the place. It wasn't just in the immediate area. And like you said, because the fire department was then out of commission, that's real trouble.

• 24:51Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so it took a little while for more aid to show up. But apparently, this explosion was so bad and the catastrophe was so great. The Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Marines, Texas National Guard, and then firefighters from surrounding cities all came out to help.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Man.

• 25:09Josh Clark?

  And this wasn't just like putting this chemical fire out, but also like trying to, you know, rescue people from rubble. Like, there's really a lot that we could sit here and say, but if you have a computer in front of you, like, just look up pictures from the Texas City explosion of 1947.

• 25:29Josh Clark?

  It's just unreal what happened to like enormous steel buildings just turned into like twisted metal. And this is like, you know, the middle of a workday. So there were people trapped all over the place in this debris. So there was a huge rescue operation that had to start, but it was delayed because most of the people who were tasked with that kind of thing had all been killed in the initial blast.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so remember earlier, we said that there were three ships there. This one blows up and obviously, you know, it's a, it's a full on like 9/11 scene at this point with just how chaotic it is. People are not noticing that right next door, the SS High Flyer also, remember, was loaded with this stuff and also with sulfur, which makes it become unstable. And this thing had been unlodged. I mean, I'm surprised, it's just the integrity of these ships is the only reason that those weren't just blown to bits too. Like it was kind of right next to it and it was still intact at least.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  And it was blown from its moorings though and drifted over and kind of attached itself to the Wilson Bikine, which was again in the slip next to it. And I think there were some crew members aboard in there that I guess were just protected by that thick steel, right?

• 26:56Josh Clark?

  Yeah, from what I understand.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  And they were kind of still doing their thing.

• 26:59Josh Clark?

  For a little while and they were finally, because the, the High Flyer caught fire as well, they were finally forced out by the smoke because this is some noxious, noxious smoke. This isn't, I mean, this isn't just like wood burning smoke. This is some really bad chemical smoke that can mess you up. It's crazy that these sailors stayed aboard for an hour, but they're finally forced off a ship, but they tell people like, hey, this is, this is on fire. And everybody's like, have you seen the other problems we have over here? And the fire department just got basically vaporized. So the fire was allowed to continue on the High Flyer for hours, hours and hours. Like that blast happened at 9:12 a.m.

• 27:39Josh Clark?

  And it wasn't until the afternoon that somebody else rediscovered the fire aboard the high flyer and started to kind of like raise the alarm about this. Still, this is such a chaotic scene that there wasn't anything immediately done about it. And it wasn't until 11:00 PM that they're finally like, oh, this is a really, this is a bad jam because not only do we have a thousand tons, tons of ammonium nitrate aboard the high flyer, there's that sulfur you mentioned Chuck, and like you said, it makes it even more unstable in that, you know how ammonium nitrate oxidizes things?

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:17Josh Clark?

  Sulfur is like food to that stuff. It oxidizes sulfur. It's just like piling on this oxidizing fuel to make the blast even more energetic. So it would, it would be a really big problem if the high flyer blew up. So they brought in some tugboats and a fireboat, I think from Galveston and started to try to take it out of the berth to tug it out to sea to let it like burn out or blow up or whatever it was gonna do. But I guess it was stuck so fast that, that they couldn't get it out.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, this thing was not, I guess, just sort of wedged in there from that first explosion. And I think they worked on it for a couple of hours. They started at about 11:00 PM. And then it looks like by 1:00 AM, they had stopped that process. And at 1:10, and this is now on April 17th, you know, early next morning, the high flyer exploded as well. And this was even more violent. The only, I mean, it's not a saving grace at all because everything was already leveled, but the only reason it didn't cause more death and more destruction. Sadly, is because everything was already destroyed and most people were already dead.

• 29:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and plus also, they knew enough by this time that they needed to clear the area, that there wasn't anything they could do. So, everybody who was working in the rescue operation was told to leave. So, there, I just, I don't know if there were any more deaths from the high flyer blowing up, but the problem was, is that any fires that might have been put out were relit, and other structures that may have been spared from the initial blast were now leveled, or caught fire, or both. So, it was a big problem that the high flyer blew up as well.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  I think it sunk the Wilson Keane, too, didn't it?

• 30:07Josh Clark?

  It did, it sunk it. And it was, it was, yeah, I can only imagine, too, also, if you survived that first one, to have another blast like that, even one you were away from and you knew was coming, would just do something to the nerves that would be really difficult to recover from.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 30:25Josh Clark?

  You want to take a break?

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'll take a little break and we'll talk about sort of the results of the devastation and a couple of other incidents right after this.

• 30:51Josh Clark?

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• 31:00Speaker 02

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• 31:13Josh Clark?

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• 31:29Speaker 02

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• 31:51Speaker 02

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• 32:27Josh Clark?

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• 32:51Speaker 02

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• 33:03Josh Clark?

  These stories reveal that life is bigger than a moment, a condition, or a tough day. Listen to Voices of VivGart on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 33:20Speaker 02

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• 33:34Josh Clark?

  Well, with Base44, describe that in your own words. You don't need to know coding or programming. Then you just keep editing and refining it until it works exactly the way you want. Your build comes headache-free with built-in login, data storage, backend, and hosting. So what's the app you wish existed?

• 33:51Speaker 02

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• 34:13Josh Clark?

  Okay, so Chuck, one thing that we didn't say was that the initial explosion by the Grand Camp created like a 15-foot tidal wave that washed inland. And people died almost in creative ways in this disaster. And one of those ways was those petrochemicals, I think there was a molasses refinery that started to get mixed in that kept the petrochemicals burning in the water when it mixed with them. When this tidal wave blew out, when it blew in, I'm sorry, it was on fire. So it actually caught people on fire. It caught people on

• 34:55Josh Clark?

  fire on the way back out to sea. And people who'd survived the initial blast were actually swept out and drowned from this, too. There were people who died in airplanes that had come around to kind of circle the area and were blown out of the sky. There were people who died in buildings that collapsed. There were people who died from shrapnel falling out of the sky and killing them even though they were miles away. Like, there was so much death and destruction that it's really difficult to get across what happened to this poor little port city that hadn't done anything to anybody that just suddenly blew up.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, in the end, the official death toll was close to 600, 581 people, 113 of which were just vaporized. No trace was ever found of 113 people. Casualties up to 5,000. The numbers kind of vary, but anywhere from 3,500 to 5,000. And, you know, Texas City was not a very big place. It was about 16,000 strong. So this was just devastating to the city and to the region. It took about a week to put out all these fires, and I think a full month plus to Recover whatever bodies they could recover at that point.

• 36:18Josh Clark?

  Yeah, the final body wasn't found until mid-May. The, there was, there were people who were never, like you said, accounted for. There were, there were, the converse of that was true, too. There were parts of people that were never identified. And one of the accounts that I read was, like I was saying, was written by, I think, a University of Houston historian named Cheryl Lowersdorf Ross in the, in the Journal of Houston History. But she recounts somebody mentioning a woman who was trying to identify her husband,

• 37:00Josh Clark?

  who is lost in the disaster, and she had to sort through hands. They had a collection of hands that this woman was trying to figure out which one belonged to her husband. And like, that's just nuts to hear, but if you can even begin to put yourself into that woman's shoes.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, the reality of that.

• 37:19Josh Clark?

  Yes, of being in that room of like, looking at different hands. And then also, not just the horror of that, of like, having to look through body parts that may or may not be your husband's, but then the self-doubt, like, is that my husband's hand? Like, I don't remember what it looked like, you know, like that, just your mind messing with you on top of the horrific experience that you're already undergoing. But she was one of many, because something like 61 people, I believe, were interred without being identified, but their, their remains were kind of assembled and, and, and put together in a memorial service that was attended by something like thousands of people, I believe.

• 38:02Josh Clark?

  So Chuck, so if there was 16,000 people and that many people were hurt or killed by this blast, you can imagine how quickly this little town was overwhelmed with all these casualties. And so they were getting people like every which way, trucking them over to Galveston, like getting them wherever they could, whatever hospital they could find. But very quickly, the high school gym was taken over to serve as a field hospital. And then shortly after that, the morgue. And one of the stories that stuck out to me was the Boy Scouts were pressed into service to basically help out however they could. And these poor little like, like teenage and preteen scouts are like working in this makeshift morgue in their high school gym. Like imagine the impression that had on them the rest of their life, you know?

• 38:47Speaker 02

  Geez.

• 38:48Josh Clark?

  I know, isn't that crazy? Like every aspect of this story is just nuts.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  It's very sad. Yeah, and of course, the, the financial loss was huge. About a hundred million dollars in property loss, 500 million in lost petroleum products. And that's about 700 million and 3.5 billion in today dollars. I think there is sort of buried beneath the burms there is a memorial park where 63 unidentified victims are buried.

• 39:19Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's what I was talking about.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there's that anchor that we talked about. I don't know if it was the one that actually blew the mile and a half away, but at least one of the anchors is, is a monument at the park along with a scarred propeller from the high flyer at the entrance to the port there at Texas City.

• 39:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so that, that funeral procession that they had that attracted, I think something like 5,000 mourners was a real like community effort. There were something like 50 plus funeral homes from 28 different cities that all participated. And each of these 63 unidentified people, or there remains I should say, were put in their own individual caskets and buried in the memorial park, which is still, you know, there, that, that park is still there with the anchor and everything. But it was, it's just, it's such an enormous weird catastrophe and just such a devastating thing, especially looking back 70 years to read about. But when you do read about it, if you can just kind of put yourself in mind of what

• 40:20Josh Clark?

  that was like, you know, trying to recover from that, it's, it's astounding that Texas City did recover. A lot of people moved and just said, not only like, do I think the city is never going to come back from this, I don't know if I can come back from this. But the city actually did come back and they did build back, from what I understand, even bigger than before, which is how that BP refinery that ended up blowing up, that became the most profitable in BP's entire company, because the city built back even better than before.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  That's great.

• 40:55Josh Clark?

  It is great.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  I mean, not great that it exploded again in 2005, obviously, but great that they had to stick to it and us to come back as a city. So, you know, obviously, following something like this, there's going to be a lot more regulation going on. The US is going to step up federally and say, hey, wait a minute. We really need to take a look at how we're handling these chemicals, how we're storing these things, how we're shipping these things. And a lot of changes were made here and around the world, but it's not to say that that completely prevented this from happening again because in Beirut just last year, in August of 2020, there was another big cargo of ammonium nitrate that had been sitting in a warehouse for seven years.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  It's no one is exactly sure why it ignited this time, but there was a dock worker that said that there were fireworks stored nearby. And they did find thousands of kilograms of fireworks recovered from a warehouse at that port. And this explosion was, you know, it was a crater about 460 feet wide. And, you know, it was about as big as the Texas City blast.

• 42:00Josh Clark?

  I, so I saw both. I saw that it was about as big and I saw that it was about half the size. But, I mean.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  But even at half, you know?

• 42:07Josh Clark?

  But so, yeah, go look at video of that. What's astounding about that Beirut blast is there happens to be people who are filming when it happened because there was a fire.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Oh, I remember when it happened, yeah.

• 42:17Josh Clark?

  So you've seen that, that, like that white cloud? That's that water vapor expanding, right? And the, the, you can't see it, but there's nitrous oxide gas in there as well.

• 42:28Josh Clark?

  So imagine twice that size. That's, that would probably be about the size of that first Texas City blast in 1947.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I remember seeing it on the news and I don't remember if they mentioned Texas City, but.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this is stuff that was just stored down there for like seven years soaking up that that warm kind of moist Mediterranean breeze.

• 42:51Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  Not the way you should handle and store this stuff.

• 42:55Josh Clark?

  No, and like the story behind it's kind of interesting, like the it was started in Georgia, not our Georgia, but the Republic of Georgia, on way on route to Mozambique. And the apparently the owners were like, we're not making enough money on this this trip. So we're gonna divert over to Beirut and pick up some more freight. And the crew said, no, we're not gonna do that. It's gonna make the weight dangerous. So they balked, port fees started racking up, and the owners apparently just decided to abandon the crew, the ship, and the cargo. The cargo, once it was impounded, should have been sold off, but it wasn't. Instead, it just, like you said, sat there, stored incorrectly for six years until something caused it to blow up, which is, I mean, just the the idea that it was just negligence

• 43:38Josh Clark?

  that led to that catastrophe is it's even worse. I think that's something that's missing from the Texas City disaster. There there wasn't really any negligent act, maybe a mistake or a bad choice, but no one was particularly negligent about it. So I think that's it kind of makes the Beirut blast even worse, that people were supposed to be doing stuff that they didn't do, and a lot of people died as a result.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the BP refinery in 2005, they had to pay out about 50 million bucks for that one.

• 44:09Josh Clark?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  After they did a a little safety audit, and in that safety audit, they found, and this was before the blast, actually, they did a safety audit, and they found that a lot of people that worked at this plant, it says, came to work with, quote, "an exceptional degree of fear of catastrophic incidences."

• 44:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  Incidents, end quote. That's a little bit of an ocean nightmare.

• 44:31Josh Clark?

  Everything that I've read about that was that that was a direct result of BP cutting safety in favor of higher profit margins, that that's what happened, that's what allowed this plant to deteriorate, and the machinery just didn't work. But they traced this explosion, this is an oil refinery explosion, it had nothing to do with ammonium nitrate, but the the I think whatever whatever chemical they put in gas to boost the octane level. They turned a machine on that does that and somehow like all these components to the to gasoline started vaporizing out into the air. It started shooting out of this tower because the pressure was overloaded. And there was so much gas vapor in the air that

• 45:12Josh Clark?

  somebody had a pickup truck running nearby and it got sucked up into the air intake and the engine started revving. And that's actually what ignited the whole thing, all of this gas vapor, this pickup truck sucking in gas molecules that were just vaporized in the air around it.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  Crazy.

• 45:29Josh Clark?

  In Texas City, again.

• 45:33Josh Clark?

  It's crazy. So you got anything else?

• 45:37Speaker 02

  I got nothing else.

• 45:38Josh Clark?

  Well, if you want to know more about the Texas City disaster, you can go look that up. I would strongly recommend reading Cheryl Lauer's Dorf Ross's Changing Lives in a Heartbeat journal article. And also, big shout out to fireengineering.com. They had a good one. And then the local 1259, the Texas City Firefighters Union, has a really comprehensive overview of the Texas City disaster, too. So maybe check those out for even more details. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail?

• 46:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm gonna call this, well, I'm gonna call it what Ryan called it. Well, I'm dumb, but I'm over it. Hey, guys, long time, first time. I thought I'd tell you, you had me duped for a long time when I first started listening to the show a few years ago. And probably for a year after that first episode, I honestly thought there was a list of key words that Josh referred to toward the end of the episode, whenever he says, well, since I said blank, it's time for listener mail. For an embar-- this is very cute. For an embarrassingly long time, I really thought that the blank word was from a predetermined master list and that you had revealed that list of words to the audience in an early episode.

• 46:55Josh Clark?

  Wow.

• 46:56Speaker 02

  I guess like the magic word in--

• 47:00Josh Clark?

  Pee Wee's Playhouse?

• 47:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. Was that what it was? Yeah.

• 47:04Josh Clark?

  This guy must have really loved Peewee's Playhouse.

• 47:07Speaker 02

  I started listening to increasingly older episodes in hopes that I would hear that list or catch a trend toward the words used.

• 47:13Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 47:14Speaker 02

  Josh's transition with that statement at the end of every episode is just so smooth. Hey, there you go.

• 47:18Josh Clark?

  Thanks, man.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  It wasn't until one episode, when Josh's word was so mundane, so common, it was probably the or if or something along those lines, that I finally realized, there is no list. I had been fooled.

• 47:29Josh Clark?

  The scales just fell from his eyes and he was free finally.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  Well, since you said scales, those random words are just that, random. I actually felt a bit disappointed when I realized this, but it actually took some of the mystery out of the show, but I'm over it now. Whether or not it's good to admit I had been fooled by this for a long time is up for debate, but been meaning to tell you about this for a while. Hope you think of me every time Josh transitions to listener mail from now on. I totally will.

• 47:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 47:55Speaker 02

  Take care and keep doing what you're doing, because it's a fantastic show. And since I said show, dot, dot, dot.

• 48:00Josh Clark?

  Mm hmm. What?

• 48:01Speaker 02

  That's great. That is from Ryan Peschel.

• 48:04Josh Clark?

  Thanks, Ryan. Thanks for getting in our heads like that. Apparently we got in your heads too, so it's only fair. Don't you think, Chuck?

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, and just right then, I didn't think we had a listener mail. And then look what pops up.

• 48:15Josh Clark?

  Ryan Peschel saves the day again. And only Ryan knows what I'm talking about. It just ruined his life again. He's back in the game. If you want to get in touch with us and try to get in our heads like Ryan did, so we have to think of you every time we say something about listener mail or what have you, you can write to us. Send us an email to [email protected].

• 48:41Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 48:57Josh Clark?

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• 51:06Speaker 06

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