The Galveston County Daily News

TEXAS CITY — On April 16, 1947, was student nurse Lydia Biegert’s day off from clinical duty. She awoke late. When she walked outside her University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston dormitory, she was told to immediately dress for duty — she was going to Texas City.

She didn’t ask questions. She got in a car with three other medical students and a physician she didn’t know, and headed into a town she had never seen.

For the rest of the day, the 20-year-old student nurse witnessed the bodies of small children being brought, one after another, into a makeshift emergency room at Beeler-Manske Clinic. She and a medical student spent hours cleaning and suturing the wounds caused by flying glass. She said the dozens of children brought in that day never screamed or cried, even when the team ran out of local anesthetic.

She never saw the children or the medical staff from that day again, she said.

For years, Biegert said, she suppressed the memories of that day and did not speak of it to anyone. Now a retired psychiatric nurse and teacher, she will revisit the memory as the keynote speaker at this year’s Texas City Disaster Memorial Service.

The 1947 Texas City Disaster killed an estimated 600 people in the double explosion of two ships that was accompanied by a tidal wave and citywide fires. On the morning of April 16, the cargo ship Grandcamp, which was carrying ammonium nitrate fertilizer, caught on fire. An explosion followed, destroying the ship and the High Flyer.

Biegert said that the years of not consciously thinking about her experience was a form of self-protection.

But her memories surfaced 10 years ago when she took a writing class at College of the Mainland and wrote an essay about that day in 1947.

“I was in tears thinking of those children. All of this time, that had been in my head, in me,” she said, patting her chest. “There was such tremendous emotion when I looked at the words I had written.”

As the car crossed the Causeway that day into Texas City, she saw towers of smoke, Biegert said. Then as the car got closer into town, she saw “red, red flames.”

The scene on Sixth Street reminded her of newsreels of war-torn Europe, she said. There were metal parts from the plants littering the streets and it was “absolutely deserted, no people, no cars,” she said.

“‘What have I gotten myself into?’ I thought,” Biegert said. “I was scared. I was scared. When we drove past the flames, they were really close,” she said. None of her family or friends knew where she was, she said.

“When I first reported, I thought, am I going to be able to do what I need to do?”

Time blurred that day. Her job was to sterilize the instruments, long-handled tools usually used for tonsillectomies, or to help clean and dress wounds.

“I don’t know how long I worked. We were just taking care of little bodies,” she said.

Throughout her nursing career, she learned to grow distant from her patients or it would compromise the quality of her work, she said.

There are no memorials to medical care workers in Texas City. But Biegert doesn’t want monuments or statues for care workers who worked that day, saying it simply was their duty.

Instead, when she thinks of that day, she recalls seeing a smoke-blackened man running towards the flames or the begrimed rescue workers bringing in child after child to the operating table.

The honors should be given to the aid workers and the people of Texas City, who pooled their resources and rebuilt the city.

“It was the people of Texas City that endured, that picked themselves up,” she said.

+++

WHAT: Texas City Disaster Memorial Service.

WHEN: 9 a.m. Saturday.

WHERE: Memorial Park at Loop 197 and 29th Street in Texas City.

CALL: (409) 948-3111.

+++

WHAT: “We Remember 1947” reunion photo.

WHEN: 11 a.m. Thursday.

WHERE: Charles T. Doyle Convention Center Phoenix Fountain. In case of bad weather, photo shoot will move inside the convention center.

WHO: Anyone who is a survivor of the 1947 Texas City Disaster is asked to attend the photo shoot.

VOLUNTEERS: Community volunteers are welcome to come out and lend a hand.

CALL: (409) 683-5334.