Texas City 1947: The Fertilizer Ship

Shortly after eight in the morning, dock workers in Texas City open a hatch on a French cargo ship. Smoke is coming out of hold number four. Down there, packed in paper bags, are nearly two thousand tons of fertilizer. They throw water from containers. They try an extinguisher. Someone calls for a hose. Then someone gives an order: no water. It would damage the cargo. The smoke turns a reddish orange. The city's volunteer firemen arrive and run their hoses. Nobody on the dock has been told what this cargo can do. At twelve minutes past nine, the ship exploded. By the next morning, a second ship had blown up nearby. Hundreds of people were dead. The cargo had been made in government plants, under a US government program, labelled as fertilizer, and handled like any other sack on the dock. This is the story of how a cargo meant to feed Europe devastated an American port, and why the people on that dock had never been warned.

After the Second World War, the United States had to feed the people of the countries it occupied: Germany, Japan and Korea. Farms there needed fertilizer. And the United States had idle ordnance plants that could make ammonium nitrate. About fifteen former ordnance plants were turned over to fertilizer. The Army's Chief of Ordnance ran the program, through private contractors. The product had a name: fertilizer grade ammonium nitrate. It was known by its initials: F-G-A-N. The ship at Texas City was the Grandcamp. She had been built in 1942 as a Liberty ship, the Benjamin R. Curtis. Now she belonged to the French government, and she was loading cargo for Europe. Texas City was an industrial port on Galveston Bay. A Monsanto chemical plant, oil tanks and warehouses stood close to the docks. Into the Grandcamp went oil field machinery, peanuts, twine, ammunition and explosives, and between about 1,850 and 2,300 tons of the fertilizer.

Ammonium nitrate is an oxidizer: it can feed a fire with oxygen. Under heat and confinement, or a severe shock, it can detonate. Contamination makes that more likely. To stop the fertilizer from caking in damp weather, the plants coated it with a mixture of paraffin, rosin and petrolatum. All three are organic. All three can burn. The specification let it be bagged at about 200 degrees Fahrenheit, into paper bags of one hundred pounds. The bags said "Fertilizer Ammonium Nitrate". They carried no hazard warning and no handling instructions. The 1947 fire report blamed the labelling for a false sense of security in handling ammonium nitrate. Today, the dangerous goods list draws a hard line for ammonium nitrate itself. With no more than 0.2 percent combustible material, it is class 5.1, an oxidizer. With more, it is listed as an explosive, division 1.1D. Before loading, the Grandcamp's fertilizer had sat for about three weeks in a Texas City warehouse.

On the morning of April 16th, the stevedores were told to report at eight, not seven as usual. The 1947 fire report could not say why. When the hatch of hold four came off, they saw smoke. The fire was down beside the hull, behind the boards that line the hold. The first attempts were small: containers of water and a soda-acid extinguisher. Then came the order not to use water. Later accounts say the hatch was battened down under tarpaulins, and steam was piped into the hold, to put out the fire without spoiling the cargo. The 1947 fire report said the steam was reported, but not confirmed. For an ordinary cargo fire, closing the hold makes sense: it starves the fire of air. But ammonium nitrate brings its own oxygen. A closed hold does not starve it. It adds heat and confinement. At about half past eight, the crew was ordered off the ship, and someone telephoned the fire department. Photos taken between 8:37 and 8:50 show hoses at work. The smoke was dense and reddish orange, the colour of nitrogen oxides. By nine o'clock, the steel hull was hot enough to turn water into steam.

At 9:12, the cargo in hold four detonated. Witnesses heard a second blast a few seconds later. The blast threw a wave more than fifteen feet high across the docks. It lifted a 150-foot oil barge and carried it about two hundred feet. The shock was felt in Galveston, ten miles away. Around a thousand buildings were badly damaged or destroyed. The Monsanto plant beside the docks was wrecked by the blast, the wave and flying steel. Grain warehouses and many oil and chemical tanks were destroyed. The firemen who had answered the call were standing on the dock. All twenty-six firemen on the dock were killed. All four of the city's fire trucks were destroyed. And it was not over. Another ship loaded with the same fertilizer was tied up nearby.

The High Flyer carried about a thousand tons of the same fertilizer, and two thousand tons of sulphur. The blast tore her loose and pushed her against another ship, the Wilson B. Keene. Tugs with volunteer crews from Galveston tried to pull her away in the afternoon, and failed. They tried again late at night. They freed her from the Keene, but her stern anchor held. A tow line snapped. At about ten past one in the morning of April 17th, the High Flyer exploded. The Wilson B. Keene was destroyed with her. Because the area had been cleared, only a few people were killed or injured this

time. There is no final official count. The sources of the time give between about 560 and 600 dead. The memorial counts 576: 398 identified and 178 missing. About three thousand people were injured. Sixty-three of the dead were buried unidentified in a memorial cemetery. Behind every one of those numbers is a family. The city had no central disaster organization. Power and water were cut. The chemical and oil plants started their own emergency plans, and hundreds of local volunteers fought fires and searched the ruins. With the Red Cross and help from nearby cities, almost four thousand people joined the effort. The Bureau of Mines put property and business losses at more than 58 million dollars of the time.

What started the fire was never settled. A Coast Guard board blamed unauthorized smoking in the hold, according to the maritime press. The 1947 fire report called a cigarette possible, but doubtful. Its conclusion: the cause would probably never be known. Survivors and property owners sued the United States. One test case stood for some three hundred claims, worth two hundred million dollars in total. A federal trial court found the government negligent. It pointed to the decision to make the product, the coating, the hot bagging, and the failure to warn the shippers and the city. An appeals court reversed that ruling, and in 1953 the Supreme Court agreed, four to three. Those choices, it said, were policy decisions, and the law that lets citizens sue the government leaves them out. Justice Robert Jackson dissented. He wrote: "This was a man-made disaster; it was in no sense an act of God." Look at the chain. A product from ordnance plants, with a combustible coating, bagged hot in paper. A label with no hazard warning. A fire fought to save the cargo, not to cool it. And people on the dock who had never been warned. The 1947 fire report was clear on the lesson. Fight an ammonium nitrate fire with large amounts of water. Do not use steam until it has been tested. Warn the fire chief when a hazardous cargo is in port.

Three months later, it happened again. In July 1947, the Ocean Liberty caught fire in Brest, France, carrying 3,160 tonnes of ammonium nitrate. She exploded in the harbour, and more than twenty people were killed. French courts later held the American manufacturer liable. On appeal, in 1957, the court noted that in 1947 science did not yet see ammonium nitrate as dangerous in itself. The fire report also asked for red labels: "Hazardous Chemicals", "Ammonium Nitrate", "Handle With Care". It asked for no smoking on piers, for warnings to the fire chief, and for a disaster plan in every industrial city. In 1953, the National Research Council published a compendium on shipping, storing and stowing ammonium nitrate. In 1955, Congress passed a law accepting what it called the "compassionate responsibility" of the United States. Claims were capped at 25,000 dollars each. By 1956, the claims had been settled for about 16.5 million dollars. Ammonium nitrate would explode again: in West, Texas, in 2013, and in Beirut in 2020.

In Texas City, what failed was everything around the cargo. A label that gave no warning. A fire fought like any other. Firemen and dock workers who had been told nothing about the hazard. A cargo is only as safe as what the people handling it know. This is Hazard Manifest. If you want to understand the dangerous side of global trade, subscribe.