The Texas City Horror (July/August 1996 | Volume: 47, Issue: 4)

The Texas City Horror

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Authors: The Readers

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July/August 1996 | Volume 47, Issue 4

April 16,1947, in Texas City, Texas, started out as a beautiful spring day. I was in my last year of high school, practicing for the senior play, making plans for the prom, and looking forward to going to college in the fall. I was having a lot of fun and felt good about the future.

My second class that morning was Physical Education. After dressing and leaving the gym, I started walking to the main building and immediately noticed a large cloud of orange smoke billowing up from the city’s dock area. A couple of my friends decided to play hooky and walk down to the docks to get a closer look. I almost accompanied them but went instead to my typing class.

About twelve minutes after the class started, I glimpsed a sudden flash outside the windows that seemed to be lightning. In a second or two a deafening boom shook the building, and about two or three seconds later I heard another ear-splitting blast. Without thinking I quickly dropped to the floor and tried to crawl under my typing desk. J. B. Meyers, who was next to me on the floor, shouted, “Open your mouth.” We all felt a piercing pain in our ears.

I didn’t know what had happened. I expected the ceiling to fall but in a few seconds realized the building wouldn’t collapse.

Fortunately my classroom faced away from the blast area, and none of my classmates had any major injuries. A few moments after the second explosion everyone got up from the floor and calmly exited the room. Students from other classes were also filing into the hall. Most of them had bloody faces, caused by flying glass. I noticed that the steel-frame windows had all of their glass blown out and the frames were bowed inward. Across the hall stood a row of lockers; slivers of glass had made scratches that revealed bare metal beneath the paint. The wall on the side of the stairway had buckled, and the doors to the outside had been torn off their hinges.

Oddly enough there was no panic. In eerie silence we all walked quickly outdoors. Out on the campus grounds the situation seemed worse, since almost everyone had been cut by glass. I later learned that no one in the high school was killed or even seriously hurt.

My teacher asked me to run over and see if her small child and baby-sitter were okay. Her apartment was near the high school, and it didn’t take me long to get there. Miraculously, neither baby nor sitter had received so much as a scratch. I ran back to school and told the teacher not to worry.

She asked me then to go to a nearby drugstore and get Mr. Coffee, the pharmacist, to come over to the high school with his first-aid kit. When I got there the entire floor was covered