Today's story is about cigarettes and fertilizer.
The University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
On April 19, 1995, some
murderers parked a U-Haul truck filled with only
slightly modified ammonium nitrate fertilizer in
front of an Oklahoma City office building. They
ignited it, killed 168 people, and injured 600
more. That was 48 years and two days after a far
larger charge of the same material had gone off
accidentally here in Texas.
Hugh Stephens tells how, on April 16th, 1947, two
Liberty ships docked at Texas City on the Houston
ship channel -- the Grandcamp and the
High Flyer. Both were loading cargoes of
that same fertilizer. The Grandcamp held
2300 tons -- the High Flyer, 1000 tons.
The rest of High Flyer's cargo was sulfur.
At 8:00 that morning, a small fire broke out in one
of the Grandcamp's holds. The ship master
tried to suffocate the fire by closing the hatches.
He didn't want to use water for fear he'd damage
his cargo. At 8:30, the hatches blew and, observers
said, a beautiful orange smoke began pouring out.
Finally firemen began hosing down the hold. But, by
now, the water just vaporized.
At 9:12, a terrible explosion! Pedestrians were
knocked down ten miles away in Galveston! People
150 miles away heard the sound. Two airplanes were
blown out of the sky. Oil tanks were ignited.
Throughout the day, the extent of the horror
unfolded. Fire was everywhere. The nearby High
Flyer was burning. At 1:00 AM it exploded even
more violently than the Grandcamp had. In
the end, some 600 people died and 3500 or so were
injured. Property damage ran to billions measured
in today's dollars.
How could such a thing happen? No-smoking signs
were posted, but who paid any mind to a no-smoking
sign in 1947! A cigarette almost surely started the
fire. Texas docks had shipped munitions during
WW-II under tight military control. Their safety
record had been spotless. Now the military was
gone. People grew careless. Worst of all, no one
seemed to realize that , under the right
circumstances, ammonium nitrate fertilizer can
become is a vicious explosive.
Some of the terrible fertilizer explosions --
Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center -- were
intentional. But I finished high school in the
logging town of Roseburg, Oregon the same year
Texas City burned. Twelve years later, in 1959, a
truck delivering six tons of fertilizer parked
overnight in downtown Roseburg. Loggers needed it
to blow up large stumps. Lay a sack of fertilizer
and a quarter stick of dynamite on a stump --
good-bye stump!
This time, someone dropped a cigarette into a trash
barrel next to the truck. The fire detonated the
truck at 2:00 AM. Luckily the downtown was almost
empty. Thirteen people died nevertheless, and the
devastation was total over an area six blocks in
diameter.
For half a century, we've feared the atom bomb and
high technology. Meanwhile, we suffer these
devastating onslaughts, not from hi-tech at all,
but from fertilizer and cigarettes!
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Stephens, H.W.,
The Texas City Disaster: April 16th-22nd,
1947. Manuscript in preparation as of July,
1996.
I am grateful to Hugh Stephens, UH Political
Science Department, for suggesting the topic and
providing chapters of his book, and to Thomas Rooke
of Roseburg, Oregon, for his personal account of
the Roseburg explosion.
Photo courtesy of Special
Collections, UH Library
Parking lot 1/4 mile from explosion, to right of
picture.
Photo courtesy of Special
Collections, UH Library
The High Flyer, three days after the
explosion
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
Lienhard.
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