Word: waterfronts
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...morning sun shone warm and bright. It looked like another great day for the war-fat Gulf port town of Texas City, Tex.-"The Port of Opportunity." Stores were busy, prosperous people "howdy'd" one another in the streets. Down along the waterfront, $125 million worth of oil refineries, tin smelters and chemical plants labored mightily to assure Texas City's future. Down there too was the only small blot on the day-the French freighter Grandcamp, loaded with ammonium nitrate fertilizer and docked some 700 ft. from the great Monsanto Chemical Co. plant, was afire...
...that had been circling over the harbor plummeted down together with 300-lb. chunks of ship's steel. Then, in a splitting series of explosions (one of which flipped a fire truck on top of the beached barge), the Monsanto plant and most of the rest of the waterfront blew...
...telephone operator flashed neighboring Houston: "For God's sake, send the Red Cross. ..." A dazed young woman walked the streets with a dead child in her arms. Stunned people walked into the sides of buildings and cars, and on the waterfront, those heroic people who always turn up when men are dying died themselves while following cries from under the flaming wreckage. Trucks loaded with dead rumbled by and sound trucks bellowed warnings through the streets...
...midnight, some of the people who had fled Texas City began to drift back. Some ignored police warnings that the waterfront was "pluperfect hell" and went down to help. Hundreds of grimy, gas-masked men, stupid with fatigue, still labored there-probing for severed legs, torsos, heads, in the red glow of the unquenchable fire. Sometimes squads of rescuers staggered for cover when a change of wind whipped the .blistering heat around. Among them was Father William Roach, of St. Mary's Catholic Church. Father Roach died with his rescue squad when, at 1:11 a.m., the High Flyer...
TEXAS CITY, TEX., April 16--A terrific chain of ship and waterfront explosions blasted hundreds of persons to death today and injured more than...