Texas City Disaster devastated community, changed way industry was regulated

[Draggingtree]

Texas City Disaster devastated community, changed way industry was regulated

 

Deadliest industrial accident in historyof nation led to improved industry safety

 

By Susan Carroll

Updated 4:48 pm, Monday, June 20, 2016

 

Early on the morning of April 16, 1947, Fred Atwood Jr. and his wife, Yvonne, awoke to fire alarms sounding down at the docks in Texas City.

 

They ate breakfast and gave their 6-month-old son, Kent, a bottle in his crib. Then they went outside to watch smoke rise from the French freighter SS Grandcamp docked in the town's port, along the west shore of Galveston Bay.

 

Fred Jr.'s father, Fred Sr., worked at the Monsanto Chemical Co., about 300 feet from the docks.

 

The couple and Fred Jr.'s mother got into their Oldsmobile with Kent and headed toward the orange smoke.

 

They were about a football field away when the ship, carrying ammonium nitrate, exploded.

 

"Fred," Yvonne Atwood remembers her mother-in-law saying, "start this car and get us away from here."

 

The Houston Chronicle described the devastation in Texas City, 40 miles south of Houston, in the next day's edition: "The wartime boom town of Texas City lay in warlike devastation Thursday."

 

http://www.chron.com/local/history/major-stories-events/article/Texas-City-Disaster-devastated-community-changed-8311509.php