I thought it was 1991. If it was '92, it was in the first part of the year. That was awesome. I still remember waking up to a "thunderclap" that lasted at least 20 seconds. We all got up and checked the town to see what happened. Basically what happened was that a gas leak occured in a valley that caused the gas to fester and build. A car backfired in the area, which destroyed the vehicle, along with many a trailer trash residence. Out with the old, in with the new, as it were. I still remember driving through the destruction. One of those few moments I was happy to be alive recognizing carnage.
Every time something like this happens, I get a half a dozen phone calls , mostly from friends and relatives out of the area, asking if it was close to where I work. As a refinery worker, explosions as bad as this are always in the back of your mind when you are at work. I was in one (Enron plant explosion in 1994), and I don't ever want to expirience that again.
I worked at Lyondell for awhile and it was scary when that alarm would go off. It happened two times while I was there.
Well you can go to Texas City and still see the anchor. Apparently, the story is that the ship was carrying ammonia nitrate, and when the ship caught fire, the captain elected not to hose it down because he didn't want to ruin the rest of the cargo.
Yup. A salt dome exploded and leveled everything in the immediate area. Felt like an earthquake at our house.
There is a book that was written about this called "city on fire". http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...104-2770080-5320720?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 Good read. I read it front to back in one day.
Things like this really bring home why Homeland Security focuses on protecting our port so much. Living in Southeast Texas is like living on a huge bomb.
One of the screws is also at the entrance to the port of Texas City. It's not as big as a house as someone said, but it's pretty big. It's got some nice sized chunks taken out of it. There was actually two ships filled with ammonium nitrate fertilizer (the same stuff used in the Oklahoma city bombing--except a whole shipload rather than a truckload), and the two ships went off about 16 hours apart. Of course, when the second one went off, there wasn't too many people left around to kill. The chronicle has a good feature on the whole thing: http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/metropolitan/txcity/main.html
