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Witness horror of 20th century's worst industrial disaster

Sunday, May 25, 2003

By Steve Levin, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

This book by Texas writer Bill Minutaglio starts slowly and deliberately, not unlike the tragedy at the center of this well-researched and written saga.

	"City on Fire" By Bill Minutaglio HarperCollins ($24.95)

There are the Catholic priest and the reluctant mayor, the Mexican longshoreman and the black preacher.

While their backgrounds and lives are worlds apart within the small town of Texas City, circumstances conspire to bring them together and bind them as key characters in the 20th century's worst industrial disaster, the explosion of the ammonium nitrate-laden Grandcamp ship in the heart of this Gulf port city.

In 1947, Texas City is the city of possibility, on its way to becoming the chemical capital of the world, according to a magazine article from the time.

Forty miles southeast of Houston, the town had been "turned into one of the most lucrative, strategic petrochemical centers in the world by the Rockefellers, Howard Hughes and even the far-flung members of the Bush family," Minutaglio writes.

Humble Oil, later to become Exxon, and Amoco, Monsanto and Union Carbide all crowded their plants and pipelines along the city's port, along with the world's largest tin smelter and warehouses full of cotton, peanuts, molasses -- and fertilizer, especially ammonium nitrate, which was helping crops grow in Europe's battle-scarred fields.

Those huge buildings were located near The Bottom and El Barrio, the 10-block neighborhood of unpaved streets and shacks where blacks and Mexicans lived in the segregated city.

It takes Minutaglio the first third of the book to reach the explosion, which occurred at 9:12 a.m. on April 16, 1947. The blast was of such power that the exact number of dead was never determined beyond 800. Thousands were injured. The city of 15,000 was nearly leveled, along with the numerous chemical, oil, gas and shipping companies along the waterfront.

The explosion was strong enough to yank two small planes out of the sky and rocket multi-ton pieces of the Grandcamp several miles away.

Seismologists 1,000 miles away in Denver registered the explosion, wondering whether the massive blast was an atomic bomb.

The Bottoms and El Barrio were obliterated, and a carpet of dead bodies lined the road near the port. Those victims were the many townspeople who had gathered to watch the initial fire that turned into the blast many compared to Judgment Day.

Minutaglio shares vignettes of death, bravery and disgrace from the disaster, including how some doctors refused to work on the injured who were not white.

The most bizarre occurrence was the disbelief of nurses over the inordinate number of black patients who were admitted to local hospitals. But they weren't black; they were white victims coated black with the oil and molasses that rained down after the explosion.

As horrific as the disaster itself was, the book's lingering impact is derived from the federal government's dereliction in helping the victims. A lawsuit brought in 1948 on behalf of thousands of the victims -- the first wholesale civil action ever lodged against the federal government -- charged that the United States was negligent in allowing a large quantity of ammonium nitrate, which it knew "was inherently dangerous and highly explosive," to be shipped to Texas City.

During the trial, the government's lawyers tried to blame the victims for the disaster and argued that there was nothing inherently dangerous in the fertilizer.

The U.S. District Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, with the presiding judge finding "blunders, mistakes and acts of negligence, both of omission and commission, on the part of the [U.S. government], its agents, servants and employees ... [and] such disregard of and lack of care for the safety of the public and of persons ... as to shock one."

But a federal appeals court unanimously overturned the lower court decision in 1952, and that was upheld the next year in a 4-3 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1954, the government paid representatives of the Japanese government $2 million in compensation for 22 Japanese who were injured because their fishing boat was near a U.S. atomic blast test.

The next year, after the reluctant signing of the Texas Claims Act by President Eisenhower, a total of $17 million was granted to 1,394 victims of the Texas City Disaster.

On average, each victim received a government check for $12,195.21.