The Galveston County Daily News

Danny Ayala was 8 years old when he went down to the Texas City docks to watch the orange and black smoke filling the skyline.

“My dad was a longshoreman, and when he saw me, he told me to go home,” Ayala, 70, said. “I was about a block away, and then, boom.”

It was 9:12 a.m., and the eye-catching smoke from a fire burning in the cargo hold of the French ship Grandcamp turned into a mushroom cloud. The ammonia nitrate fertilizer on the ship ignited and then exploded with the force stronger than the nuclear blast at Hiroshima, Japan.

It marked the first of two large explosions that would become known as the Texas City Disaster.

Pieces of metal fell from the sky like rain; a wall of water created by the blast enveloped the industrial sector of Texas City.

Instantly, hundreds were killed. Fragments of the blast caught nearby oil storage tanks on fire, and the neighboring Monsanto plant practically was leveled.

Ayala was knocked to the ground, unable to comprehend what had just happened. Then, a stranger who was running away from the disaster zone swooped Ayala up as if he had recovered a fumbled football and just kept going.

“He laid me across his shoulders like you see Saint Christopher does with the lamb,” Ayala recalled, choking back tears. “He saved me. He was my guardian angel.”

To this day, Ayala has no idea who the man was. All he remembers is that the man was about 30 years old.

Sixty-two years later, Ayala, whose story is among 16 featured in a production being edited by the Texas City High School video production class, wanted to publicly say, “Thank you to the man who saved my life.”

Stories never told

Ayala was one of the fortunate ones. More than 600 people died in the Texas City disaster, including every member of the Texas City Volunteer Fire Department.

The Grandcamp explosion set off fires on nearby ships including the High Flyer, which also was carrying a load of ammonia nitrate. When that ship went up after 1 a.m. April 17, rescue workers and firefighters from out of town were killed, and more property was destroyed.

Carl Trepagnier was 10 years old at the time of the disaster and lived just six blocks from the port area. As usual, he rode his silver and blue, secondhand Schwinn to school that morning, Trepagnier wrote in a chapter of “Heroes and Survivors: Personal experiences of the Texas City Disaster,” authored by Texas City native Allan Pevoto, himself a survivor of the blast.

“I don’t recall hearing a sound or feeling a percussion, only turning toward the windows and seeing a whiteness coming towards me,” Trepagnier wrote in the book. “It came in slow motion and appeared to be water thrown violently from a bucket, separating into long droplets and flying horizontally just above the desktops.

“I saw the children sitting in their desks, looking like human sculptures frozen in time. But the whiteness cruelly became thousands of shards of glass coming like rain rising before a hurricane wind.”

Trepagnier’s is among dozens of personal accounts of the disaster featured in Pevoto’s book. The book tells the stories never really told before, from the perspective of the author’s classmates at Danforth Elementary.

These many years later, Pevoto said publishing the book taught him more about people he had known all his life.

“We knew we had a common bond but didn’t know what it really was,” the college professor said. “It wasn’t until years later I found out I went to school with kids who lost parents that day for all those years.

“I went to school with kids and had no idea. That was something we never talked about, but in some ways it (brought us) closer together.”

Many of the stories in Pevoto’s book have never been told before because, “we never knew we were supposed to talk about it.”

Still, many more stories have yet been told, he said, because many people he tried to feature in the book told him it was it was just too painful to relive the experience.

A promise kept

Among the untold stories of the 1947 blast is the personal account of Fred W. Linton, the local mortician and ambulance operator whose perspective of the events provides a detailed, inside look at the rescue and recovery efforts in the hours and days after the explosions.

Linton, who died in 1970, wrote a manuscript about the efforts of the city to recover following the disaster. His daughter, Helen Linton Page, who was 5 years old at the time of the blasts, promised her mother she would bring her father’s story to life.

“True American” is her father’s “final love letter to Texas City, and it gives a thorough account of what happened,” Page said.

“I was too young to have much memory of the disaster, but I do have memories of my father,” she said. “The many friends my dad had in Texas City will hear his voice again in ‘True American’ and they will be able to reconnect with him.”

Among the stories told in the book, Linton recalls being called for ambulance service to the dock area as the crews worked to douse the flames. When a young worker said he wanted the chance to help out, Linton let the young man make the run.

He was among those killed when the Grandcamp exploded.

Linton also goes into detail and applauds the major players in the city’s reconstruction effort and takes to task those who slowed the city’s ability to recover, his daughter said.

Mainland Editor T.J. Aulds can be reached at 409-683-5334 or tjaulds(at)galvnews.com.

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At a glance

What: Texas City Disaster Memorial Service

When: 9 a.m. today

Where: Memorial Park, Loop 197 and 29th Street in Texas City

Featured speaker: Allan Pevoto, author of “Heroes and Survivors: Personal Experiences of the Texas City Disaster”

Online: Log onto galvnews.com for the Texas City Disaster special section that features the front page of the April 17, 1947, Daily News with the first newspaper reports of the disaster, a link to order a reprint of this year’s 1947 Texas City Disaster Survivor’s photo, expanded coverage of the disaster and personal accounts from survivors and a collection of video pieces shot and edited by the Texas City High School video production class featuring survivor’s stories of the blast in their own words and links to order Allan Pevoto and Helen Linton Page’s books.