Texas City, April Sixteenth, Nineteen Forty-Seven: Nine Twelve in the Morning

The fire on the French cargo ship Grandcamp had been burning for more than an hour when the Texas City volunteer fire department arrived at the dock.

It was the morning of April sixteenth, nineteen forty-seven. The Grandcamp was loaded with twenty-three hundred tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, a chemical that had been shipped in large quantities out of American ports since the end of World War Two. Nobody on the dock had been told that ammonium nitrate, under the right conditions, was an explosive. The ship's officers had tried to fight the fire with steam rather than water, fearing water damage to the cargo. By nine twelve in the morning, it did not matter.

The explosion was felt one hundred fifty miles away in Louisiana. The pressure wave knocked aircraft out of the sky over the bay. The blast destroyed most of the dock and sent metal fragments traveling two miles in every direction. The Texas City volunteer fire department was essentially annihilated at the waterfront. Dock workers who had gathered to watch the fire were killed by the thousands of pieces of steel the explosion produced.

A second ship, the High Flyer, which was also loaded with ammonium nitrate, caught fire from the debris and exploded the following morning, extending the destruction.

The official death toll came to five hundred seventy-six confirmed dead, with hundreds of additional victims unidentified or never found. It remains one of the deadliest industrial accidents in American history. The entire Texas City volunteer fire department was lost. Shrapnel from the ships was recovered more than two miles from the waterfront.

The survivors and families of the dead sued the federal government, arguing that the government's regulation of ammonium nitrate shipments had been negligent. That lawsuit, Dalehite versus United States, reached the Supreme Court, which ruled against the victims in nineteen fifty-three, finding the government protected by the Federal Tort Claims Act's discretionary function exception. Congress stepped in anyway, passing special relief legislation that paid out millions in claims despite the legal loss. The Texas City disaster changed the legal relationship between American citizens and the federal government in ways that are still felt today. The dead were not given that legacy. It was claimed by the living on their behalf.