EXPLOSION DESTROYS TEXAS TOWN!!!

WOMEN, MINORITIES HARDEST HIT!!!

GOVERNMENT, LARGE CORPORATIONS AT FAULT!!!


This is the premise of City on Fire by Bill Minutaglio, a book about the 1947 destruction of Texas City, Texas, by the explosion of 3000 tons of ammonium nitrate being loaded on the French freighter Grandcamp. This came from my “Disaster Response” wish list; in theory I’m supposed to respond to stuff like this. (So far, my experience leads me to believe that my response will be either staggering in circles with a dazed expression or sitting in a corner weeping while rocking back and forth).


Alas, this book isn’t much use to me. It’s a typical journalist approach - interview survivors, get tragic stories, place blame. Don’t get me wrong; the survivor’s stories really are tragic and I don’t grudge them the opportunity to tell them. The catch is that survivors of a disaster are usually not in a very good position to figure out what happened. Minutaglio claims that he reviewed thousands of pages of documentation and interviewed hundreds of people for this book; unfortunately, none of those documents seem to have been chemistry textbooks and none of the people interviewed seems to have been an explosive expert. The chemical and physical properties of ammonium nitrate are never discussed; it’s never explained how ammonium nitrate (normally considered an oxidizer rather than an explosive) could blow up, and there’s no attempt to pin down the actual cause of the explosion. Chemistry is evil, chemicals are bad, people die because of them. The most amazing statement to this effect is:


“A half century after ammonium nitrate almost ended the existence of Texas City, some environmental studies allege that the number one pollutant in the community is ammonia. Leading the list of the other alleged major pollutants in Texas City are nitrate compounds.”

(God forbid that the ammonia and the nitrate ever get together; it might be as bad as the mingling of the explosive metal sodium and the toxic war gas chlorine. Although Minutaglio has the courtesy to say “alleged”, the book has no references so nobody can tell where the “alleged” data came from.)


The blame-placing is what you might expect: the usual suspects. The petrochemical companies that built refineries close to “homes and schools” (without mentioning that those homes and schools were built after the petrochemical plants); chemists who interfered with “God’s own coda” by developing artificial fertilizers; the United States Army, for failing to put warnings on the ammonium nitrate bags (he’s correct here; warning labels were required by the Coast Guard and railroad regulations in effect at the time); and the Truman Administration, for supplying fertilizer to Europe (apparently feeding people was wrong because the motives were tainted; making use of ammunition plants and attempting to diminish the influence of the USSR).



The main redeeming feature from my point of view was the discussion of disaster response. (This is not a specific point of the book but you can piece it together from the survivor stories). “Incident command” is a big deal in the response community right now; there have been two many cases where responders showed up with no clear idea of what to do; in some cases, this was worse than useless, the classic example being fistfights breaking out between New York city police and firefighters over the response to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Under the incident command system, there should be a clearly defined chain of command in advance of any emergency. Texas City didn’t do half bad here. The mayor, Curtis Trahan, quickly took control, realized there was way too much for him to handle by himself, and appointed deputies to deal with specific aspects of the situation, effectively inventing the incident command system on the fly. Ironically, he was perhaps helped by the fact that people who might have contested his control - the fire chief and the port manager - were standing on the Grandcamp or the adjacent dock when the ship exploded.


The last third of the book is spent discussing the court case that resulted. It was one of the first to be brought under the Federal Tort Claims act, and resulted in a substantial award to survivors that was overturned on appeal. Minutaglio’s overall conclusion (not stated explicitly but inferred from the book) was that the Federal government was negligent (which seems to be the case) and that the explosion could have been prevented by warnings on the ammonium nitrate bags.


There’s a Coast Guard report that I can’t figure out how to link to in LibraryThing. The USCG doesn’t come to a definitive conclusion, but does note that a number of hazardous material transportation regulations were violated by the US Army, the port manager, and the cargo master of the Grandcamp. The report also notes that no smoking regulations were difficult to enforce because of threats by longshoremen to walk off the job if they were.


The Coast Guard report also notes that the correct label for ammonium nitrate would have been “OXIDIZER”; this is still true, according to modern MSDS. The flammability hazard is listed as “slight” and the major warnings are about the reactivity as an oxidizer. Although hindsight is always 20-20, it seems unlikely to me that the disaster could have been averted even if the bags had born the correct label. About the only thing that might have worked is if the captain of the Grandcamp had commenced flooding the hold at the first sign of fire. Since he went down with the ship - well, technically, up with the ship - it would be a cheap shot to question his judgement now.


I’ve already mentioned the absence of references; my final complaint is that there are no maps. I have no idea why journalists are so opposed to maps, but one would have been no end of help in figuring out what was going on.


I cannot recommend this book except as a somewhat flawed “human interest” story. ( )

Hundreds of people were killed when a ship containing ammonium nitrate caught on fire and then exploded in Texas City, Texas in 1947. ( )