The Galveston County Daily News

TEXAS CITY — The carnage along the wharfs of the Texas City port area was hard to describe for Fletcher Harris. The World War II veteran, who was wounded at Normandy, had seen his share of devastation.

What he and his Coast Guard Auxiliary crewmates witnessed on April 16, 1947, was beyond words.

The ship channel leading into the port at Texas City was swamped with wreckage. The docks didn’t look much better.

Aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Iris, Harris and 40 other auxiliary Coasties had the task of docking near where the French cargo ship Grandcamp had just hours earlier blown sky high, laying waste to almost everything near its berth and in the city.

Once there, Harris and the others were to search for any survivors.

“To look at it, we thought there was no way anyone lived through all of that,” he said.

For the most part, he would be right.

It was nightfall of April 16, and the Iris was slowly making her way through the wreckage-filled Texas City ship channel.

Crewmembers used a spotlight to search along the dock areas for signs of survivors. The light happened upon a man hanging from the top floor of a two-story office building.

He was a laborer hanging upside down by his ankle, recalled Harris, 60 years after a pair of ship explosions leveled much of Texas City and killed an estimated 600 people.

Not far from where the Grandcamp had been docked, the Iris’ captain docked in the one clear spot he could find. Another cargo ship, the High Flyer, was nearby.

Crewmembers spread out along the docks and wreckage. One group climbed up to rescue the man who had been seen dangling from the dockside building.

Harris said, from what he and others could gather, the man was not in the building when the Grandcamp exploded, but rather on the docks.

When the burning ammonium nitrate went off like a bomb, the worker was tossed into the air and was snagged by the leg in the cross beams of a dockside building.

Crewmembers continued their search for survivors.

“Sure enough, we found two or three more people alive,” said Harris.

He and his shipmate Jack Kern continued up the dock when they noticed the High Flyer also appeared to be on fire.

“I figured whatever was on that first ship that caused the explosions must be on that ship, too,” said Harris. “So we went to the captain and suggested we needed to check out (the High Flyer), too.”

Harris climbed up to the deck of the High Flyer as Kern waited below. What he saw once he made it to the top was beyond anything he could have imagined.

“The deck plates on that ship were glowing red,” he said.

“You’d never seen anything like that before — it was glowing a bright cherry red.

“There wasn’t really a lot of smoke, but you could tell something was burning below and it was super hot — like a furnace”

Harris scurried back to the docks below and began hollering to anyone who could hear that they needed to clear out.

“I kept yelling, ‘Hell fire,’” he said. “We just knew that thing was going to explode. The pressure was building up something tremendous.”

Crewmembers and the handful of rescue workers along the docks cleared out. Meanwhile, the captain of the Iris was preparing the cutter to move out.

Through the wreckage-covered docks, Harris and the crew of the Iris hoofed it back to the cutter.

“The captain’s whistle blew three times, and that meant get the hell out of there,” he said.

With everyone safely aboard, the Iris made its way out of the harbor, again maneuvering through the wreckage.

“We were going as fast as we could, which wasn’t all that fast,” said Harris. “The Iris was a pretty old ship.”

Less than 30 minutes later, with the Iris clear of the wharf, the dark sky lit up. As Harris expected, the High Flyer was carrying a large amount of ammonium nitrate as well.

When that ship went off, the explosion was more powerful than the initial blast from the Grandcamp.

“It was like watching this giant Roman candle go off,” said Harris.

While he did not live in Texas City, he considers himself among the survivors of the Texas City Disaster. Sixty years after the fatal blasts, he said the story of the Iris and her crew’s efforts is something not much talked about when people recall the 1947 explosion.

For the better part of six decades, the 84-year-old Galveston native said he has tried to gather the ship logs of the Iris with hopes of having the ship and her crew’s role in the Texas City Disaster documented.

“Thing is, no one seems to be able to find the ship’s logs,” he said.

“About all we can go on are the memories of me and those who were on board.”

For now, those memories will have to do, said Texas City Mayor Matt Doyle, who asked Harris to speak at Monday’s ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the Texas City Disaster.

Harris welcomes the opportunity.

“I think it’s a story no one has ever really heard before,” he said. “There’s no telling how many more people may have been killed had we not seen what was going on with that other ship.”

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What: We Remember: Texas City Disaster survivors’ reunion photo

When: 10 a.m. today

Where: Doyle Convention Center

Info: The annual photo features survivors of the 1947 Texas City Disaster. Lineup starts at 9:30 a.m. If it rains, photo will be taken inside the convention center. Volunteers to help seat some of the older survivors are needed.

What: 60th Anniversary of Texas City Disaster commemoration service

When: 9 a.m. Monday

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