its-a-wicked-twisted-road: married-to-a-redhead: heinoushistory: April 16, 1947: the ship is the SS
its-a-wicked-twisted-road: married-to-a-redhead: heinoushistory: April 16, 1947: the ship is the SS Grandcamp. There is a fire in the hold, and the men on the dock are members of the Texas City Volunteer Fire Department, who are attempting to extinguish it.SS Grandcamp’s cargo includes 2,200 tons of ammonium nitrate.A few minutes after this photo was taken, it’s going to detonate in one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in human history, creating a mushroom cloud more than 2,000 feet tall. All but one of the firefighters in that photo are going to be instantly killed, and no identifiable fragment of most of their bodies will ever be recovered. Nearly a thousand buildings in Texas City are going to be flattened, and windows will be broken and pedestrians knocked over by the force of the blast ten miles away in Galveston. Steel shrapnel will be flung out at hypersonic speeds and fall from the sky in molten chunks, igniting secondary fires all over the surrounding area, including the various storage tanks of the local Monsanto chemical refinery and another ship in the harbor, High Flyer, whose own 1,000 tons of ammonium nitrate will detonate in turn.At least 468 will be confirmed dead, more than 5,000 will be injured, and the disaster will cost more than $100 million in property damage (in 1947 dollars - over a billion in today’s money). An incident you never really hear about unless you live in the Houston area. I never knew about this until I moved here. I knew about it cause I worked in a ammonium nitrate plant in the late 70’s they told you all about the Texas City disaster. They scared you about it it was the only place I have ever worked at you were required to fight the FIRE!! They told you couldn’t escape the crater the blast would make if it went off. They told us they had twice as much as Texas City in one storage barn the plant had two storage barns and a bunch of rail cars loaded. I never thought much about it until the explosion at West Texas my home was less than a mile from the plant. My town would have been totally flatten if that plant had went up. -- source link
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