It all started with the cargo steamer Grankan, which was loading at the port of Texas City. For five days, port cargo handlers filled the ship with a familiar commodity – ammonium nitrate with a total weight of 2,300 tons.
Even experienced foremen of a Texas port were not aware that ammonium nitrate is not a safe substance. Hence the carelessness that led to the dire consequences.
On April 16, 1947, at 8 a.m., a fire was discovered and more than half of the city’s firefighters and reporters came to the scene. No one felt particularly threatened. To make matters worse, the captain at first made no attempt to flood the fire with water, he was sorry to spoil the valuable cargo. Intuition failed, and that’s what killed them.
At 9:12 a.m. it burst into flames. Eyewitnesses say that the “Grankan” and everyone who was near it went up in flames. The shock wave traveled onward, demolishing capital buildings, cars, oil rigs and ships in its path. Of those who were in the port at the time of the explosion, miraculously survived a few.
Explosion of the very first atomic bomb (restored video)
To do anything at this point was useless. Hell had broken loose. And that was just the beginning. Immediately, numerous oil refineries caught fire, covering the city in black smoke and flames. Almost the entire city blazed stinkingly into the night. And when all seemed to have subsided, two more ships, the Highflyer and the Wilson Keene, burst into flames at 1:00 a.m. The Highflyer and the Wilson Keene. On board was sulphur and the same saltpeter. It took three days to put out the countless deadly fires.
It didn’t take long to find out the cause of the explosion. It turned out that the blatant illiteracy of personnel and management led to the fact that the workers were quietly smoking at the loading of ammonium nitrate. And the saltpeter was packed in trivial paper bags instead of fireproof boxes.
A dropped cigarette butt sent 1,500 people to heaven, more than a third of whom died in the first explosion. The city was two-thirds destroyed, the port entirely. Three kilometers from the point of explosion were found multi-ton cast-iron machines and ship engines. The debris was demolished by cars and passing small airplanes. A disaster on an unprecedented scale for America.
It is noteworthy that a year before, a similar accident almost destroyed the Soviet port of Nakhodka: the cargo of the steamship Dalstroy detonated, killing more than a hundred people on July 24, 1946.