I am not sure if many of you are familiar with this book. Its about the Texas City disaster which occured back on April 16, 1947. A tanker full of ammonium nitrade (fertilizer -something like 10,000 tons) caught fire that day. The fire quickly spread and the fertilizer ended up exploding right there in port. The explosion literally tore the clothes off of people out in the streets. The whole city was practically wiped out. The next day, because of the original explosion, another tanker (also full of fertilizer) caught fire and exploded. In the book, they talk about how some people were never found (those that were on the docks) because they were essentially vaporized. They related the power of these explosions to the bombs that were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. All the oil tanks and peterochemical plants ended up catching fire and were burnt to the ground. Around 500 people died and thousands were injured. It was the worst industrial disaster in history. I picked up this book last week and finished it this morning. I must say, it was a great read. I highly recommend anyone that likes documentaries or that is really into history, especially history down here in SE Texas, to pick up this book. I would be really interested to hear Madmax, Refman's or any other lawyer's opinion on the legal battle that occured afterwards. A class action suit was filed against the goverment of the United States (1st time this has ever happened). The plantiffs won but the decision was overturned on appeal and held up by the Supreme court. In the end, Congress ended up passing a bill that compenstates those who lost relatives (only $12,000 per person though). What I found most amazing was the fact that Texas City received absolutely no goverment funding to help rebuild the city. Anyway, here is the link on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...103-4452089-5926257?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 This book is very graphic but well worth the read. The author of this book, Bill Minutaglio, also wrote a biography on George W. Bush.
Two threads about Texas City this week, one on the explosion, and another about the racist high school dance team...Nice to see my hometown get some love! Best reason to live in TC...FOUR BUCKS for a movie and TWO BUCKS for a matinee down at Mall of the Mainland.
I think that the worst industrial accident in history was the Union Carbide chemical plant disaster in Bhopal India. Thousands were killed and 100,000 were injured. The oddest might have to be the great molasses flood of 1919 in Boston.
I've read all about that fire, codell. Some things to note...the entire TC volunteer fire department was killed; one of my uncles worked there, but was off that day, while another uncle of mine was on his way there to go to work for the first time that day. He saw the explosion from about two miles away, turned around and never went back. And as a third generation refinery worker, it's something that's always in the back of my mind, even now as I type this from the center of a very large complex on the ship channel. I've been in a number of incidents, the scariest being the Enron/Aristech explosion in 1994. I don't ever want to see that happen again.
Several years ago I saw the anchor that was blown 2 miles from the ship, I believe it weighed a couple of tons. Grandcamp explosion
They found body parts miles away from the catastrophe. The Federal Government's response is not one of it's most shining moments, to say the least. Many of my relatives remember the event quite well.
Molasses kills. An almost identical accident happened in Mississippi in 1932. In both cases , fermentation and boiling temperatures caused massive explosions in 2 million gallon tanks. This resulted in an 8ft wave of boiling molasses... and in both cases killed the same number of victims, twentyone.
