On the morning of April 16, 1947, the French steamer SS Grandcamp was docked at the port of Texas City, a small town near Galveston, Texas. Longshoremen worked in the spring sunshine to finish filling her hold with thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate. The Grandcamp‘s cargo was a gift from the United States federal government to war-ravaged France, intended to fertilize farmer’s fields and help rejuvenate French agriculture in the aftermath of World War II. While ammonium nitrate was the bulk of her cargo, the Grandcamp was also loaded with twine, peanuts, and small arms ammunition. Ready to resume loading, the longshoremen opened the Grandcamp‘s hatches and descended into her hold.

“No Signals of Danger, Nothing to Warn the Public”

Ammonium nitrate is a chemical compound that is commonly used as a high-nitrogen fertilizer—and to make explosives. Ammonium nitrate fertilizer was infamously used to construct the truck bomb used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. On its own, ammonium nitrate is generally considered a stable substance unless exposed to both high temperatures and confined spaces with poor ventilation, which cause it to undergo thermal decomposition, transforming it into an unstable explosive substance.

The ammonium nitrate destined for the Grandcamp was manufactured in War Department ordinance plants in Iowa and Nebraska and shipped to Texas City by rail. To make it more suitable for agricultural applications and to prevent it from caking up in spreaders, PRP—petroleum, resin, and paraffin—was added to it. But while PRP makes ammonium nitrate more granular, it also makes it prone to spontaneous combustion, especially when under pressure stress. The PRP-added ammonium nitrate was packaged into 100lb. paper sacks labeled “Fertilizer-Grade Ammonium Nitrate,” but without any packaging that betrayed its volatile nature. When the ammonium nitrate arrived in Texas City, it was stored in a warehouse for three weeks while waiting for the Grandcamp‘s arrival. Workers later testified that when the bags arrived in Texas City they were so hot they needed to cool off before they could be handled.

The Grandcamp‘s cargo had been subjected to all the wrong conditions: hot temperatures aboard the railcars, tremendous pressure when it was stacked into the Grandcamp‘s hold, and poor ventilation when the hatch covers were closed overnight. 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate were already stacked into her hold when the unsuspecting longshoremen opened the Grandcamp‘s hatches on the morning of April 16. Then they saw the smoke.

“A Man-Made Disaster…of Almost Unbelievable Proportions”

Firefighters quickly arrived at the docks to combat the Grandcamp‘s fire. The Grandcamp‘s captain, afraid his cargo would be ruined when doused with water, ordered the hatches closed and for the crew to evacuate. He then forced steam into the holds, hoping to extinguish the fire without damaging the cargo. This procedure—closing the holds and smothering with steam—was a standard maritime firefighting method. But instead of putting out the fire, the steam exacerbated the problem by increasing the pressure and temperature in the cargo hold. Plumes of orange smoke, characteristic of an ammonium nitrate fire, drifted over Texas City, a siren luring curious townspeople to the docks, including a group of schoolchildren, to watch the fire. Then, approximately an hour after the fire started, the Grandcamp exploded.

The explosion obliterated the Grandcamp, hurling shrapnel through the air. The ship’s one-and-a-half ton anchor was later found buried in the ground two miles away. The explosion leveled the Texas City docks and the nearby Monsanto Chemical plant, and was so powerful it shattered windows in Houston, 40 miles away, and registered on seismographs 900 miles away in Denver, CO. Docks, warehouses, and nearby oil tankers were set ablaze by the explosion. Twenty-seven members of the Texas City Volunteer Fire Department were killed when the Grandcamp exploded; the department’s entire firefighting apparatus were destroyed in the explosion, leaving no equipment to combat the raging inferno.

Crews from Galveston and surrounding areas raced to Texas City to render aid, but ultimately were unable to do anything to combat the intense fire raging across what remained of the docks. Moored next to the burning remains of the Grandcamp was the SS High Flyer, another cargo ship destined for France. The High Flyer was loaded with 1,000 tons of ammonium nitrate and 2,000 tons of sulphur and she too caught fire. Shortly after 1am on April 17, the High Flyer exploded with a similar force and intensity as the Grandcamp. Describing the explosion, one witness said it “mushroomed like the Bikini bomb.”

“The Size of the Catastrophe does not Excuse Liability”

Texas City was decimated by the disaster. 1,000 buildings were destroyed, 570 people were killed, and 3,500 people were injured in the explosions. Only two members of the Texas City Volunteer Fire Department survived.

In the aftermath of the Texas City disaster, victims and survivors sued the federal government under the newly-enacted Federal Tort Claims Act. The FTCA was a landmark act that gave citizens the right to sue the federal government. The FTCA was spurred into passage after the 1945 crash of a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 Mitchell bomber into the Empire State Building, which killed 14 people.

8,485 Texas City disaster victims filed 273 suits against the government, which were consolidated into a single test case. The plaintiffs argued that the government “was fully on notice” of how dangerous the ammonium nitrate was, especially when mixed with PRP, and was negligent in failing to inform the railroads, ocean carriers, and harbor workers that their cargo “was an inherently dangerous fire and explosive hazard” that had strict handling, storage, and firefighting requirements. The government argued that the fire was started because longshoremen were smoking while loading the ship.

The District Court originally ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor but this was reversed on appeal in 1952. The U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit disagreed that fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate (FGAN) was “an inherently dangerous explosive” and that the fault was not with the government for failing to label it properly, but with the ship operators, who exposed their cargo to “abnormal treatment” in how it was handled and stored. It held that how the government chose to label and package the ammonium nitrate and whether it warned carriers of its danger were all discretionary choices, and therefore not actionable under the Act.

The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in a 4-3 decision (Justices William O. Douglas and Tom Clark did not take part in the case). Justice Robert H. Jackson issued a scathing dissent in which he was joined by Justices Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter. “Until recently, the influence of the Federal Government has been exerted in the field of tort law to tighten liability and liberalize remedies,” Justice Jackson wrote in his dissent. “But, when the Government is brought into court as a tort defendant, the very proper zeal of its lawyers to win their case and the less commendable zeal of officials involved to conceal or minimize their carelessness militate against this trend.” He went on to write:

Congress held several hearings on the Texas City disaster over the next two years; quotes from these hearings are used as the headings of this blog post. Congress was especially troubled by the government’s apparent unwillingness to help its own citizens who had been killed or injured as part of a wider humanitarian effort towards a foreign country. In response, Congress passed the Texas City Claims Act in 1955 to compensate victims of the disaster. The average payout for each claim was $12,195.21.

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