Southwestern Historical Quarterly

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At one point during a confused nightmare of efforts to check the roaring flames and rescue the injured, Jesse Caveness, Harris County civil defense director, declared: "If this ship [Amoco Virginia] blows, it will be worse than Texas City."

—"Fire Menaces Oil Tanks in Houston Area," Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 9, 1959.

The Houston Ship Channel is one of the busiest seaports in the United States. It extends from a turning basin located approximately four miles east of downtown Houston to the Gulf of Mexico between Galveston Island and Bolivar Peninsula, a distance of fifty-two miles.¹ The channel has been deepened and widened over the decades in order to accommodate increasingly larger vessels to keep pace with the needs of Texas industry. It measures forty feet in depth for much of its length and from three hundred to four hundred feet in width.² In addition to general cargo facilities, the channel is home to major petrochemical plants. The heavy concentration of these oil and gas companies presents the potential danger of explosions and fires, as was seen in 1959 when a major gasoline fire engulfed the tanker Amoco Virginia and in 1979 when the tanker Chevron Hawaii exploded after being struck by lightning [End Page 1] while loading oil. These events caused concern that a chain reaction of explosions among the chemical and petroleum industries that line the ship channel could touch off a disaster similar to the one at Texas City that killed more than five hundred people in 1947—the worst industrial accident in the nation's history.

Historians have not fully explored the links between these disasters and how the lessons learned from them were (or were not) applied toward industrial safety and public welfare. There were varying degrees of carelessness in many of these incidents. Certain questions need to be asked regarding the roles government and industry have played since the Texas City disaster and each of the succeeding explosions and fires at the Port of Houston. What impact did these accidents have on industrial safety, pollution control, and Texas industrialization?

The Texas City disaster started with a Liberty cargo ship named the Grandcamp, which was built in Los Angeles in 1942 and originally named the Benjamin R. Curtis.³ The ship was rather small compared to today's cargo vessels, measuring a length of 423 feet and a gross tonnage (a nonlinear measure of a ship's overall internal volume) of 7,176 tons. The United States transferred ownership of the vessel after the war to the French government, which changed the ship's name. The Grandcamp loaded cargo such as twine, cotton, peanuts, and drilling equipment in Houston prior to arriving in Texas City on April 11, 1947, to load ammonium nitrate fertilizer.⁴ This could not be done in Houston because the loading of ammonium nitrate was banned by the Houston Port Authority.⁵ U.S. Coast Guard regulations did not prohibit the loading of the chemical compound in Texas City due to the fact ammonium nitrate was listed as a "dangerous cargo" and not as an "explosive."⁶

The Port of Texas City in 1947 was home to several large plants, including "the Monsanto Chemical Company, Humble Oil and Refining Co., Stone Oil Co., Republic Oil Refining Company, 11 warehouses, 9 piers, one grain elevator, and two thirds of the residential area of Texas City," according to a Coast Guard report.⁷ Many residential blocks stood adjacent [End Page 2] to the industrial complex and the nearby docks where the Grandcamp was moored.

The Texas City disaster began on April 16, 1947, when a small fire started in one of the cargo holds of the Grandcamp, which contained some two thousand tons of ammonium nitrate in one hundred...