The Galveston County Daily News

TEXAS CITY — Ruth Lacquement was only 8 years old on April 16, 1947, but she’ll never forget the day “black rain” fell down over her head.

“I didn’t know what to think,” she said, recalling that she had been attending classes at Rosenberg Elementary School in Galveston. “We heard a boom just like everybody else and then all these black flakes started coming down. The teachers just hurried us all indoors.”

The memory remains vivid in Lacquement’s mind, so much so she created an ink drawing of the event.

“That’s me in my cowboy boots, covering my head from all the black rain,” she said of the work she brought with her to a photo shoot of survivors of the worst industrial accident in U.S. history — the Texas City Disaster.

About 600 people were killed 58 years ago today when the French cargo ship Grandcamp, which was loaded with tons of ammonia nitrate, caught fire and exploded. A few hours later a nearby ship, the High Flyer, that was also loaded down with the nitrate fertilizer also exploded.

The blasts scattered debris, including ship anchors and construction beams, as far as two miles. A tidal surge created by the blasts enveloped much of the east side of Texas City, carrying many victims out into Galveston Bay.

The ship blasts set off a series of chain reactions within the nearby oil refineries, including Monsanto Oil, now the site of Sterling Chemical and Pan American Oil, now BP.

Ismael Ponce worked the midnight shift at what was then the tin smelting plant in Texas City. He had gotten off work and like most of those in town decided to head for the docks to watch as firefighters battled a blaze aboard the French cargo ship Grandcamp.

“My momma called and told me about the fire and the orange and red smoke,” said Ponce, who was 23 at the time. “We had had fires before in town, but it had always been black smoke.

“I think that’s what drew all those people to the docks — it was color in the smoke.”

Ponce made it to the dock entrance when security personnel tried to stop him, but the recently discharged seaman from the U.S. Navy convinced them otherwise.

“I told them I fought fires in the Navy and was there to help so they let me through,” he said. “I grabbed a camera from this girl and started taking pictures.”

He wasn’t alone; lots of people were hanging out on the docks taking pictures and just plain gawking at the spectacle.

A foreman for Monsanto, the company that operated the docks where the Grandcamp was moored, started to yell at those who had gathered, said Ponce.

“He kept yelling: ‘You people get away from here! This is real dangerous! You don’t need to be here!’” Ponce recalled. “The girl took her camera back from me, so I had no real reason to be down there, so I started back.

“Everybody else ignored him.”

Just as Ponce made the turn up Second Avenue South “that thing hit,” he said.

It was 9:12 a.m.

“It felt like playing football and getting a tackle you didn’t expect,” said Ponce.

Despite the distance from the blast, Ponce was thrown to the ground. A man not more than 50 feet in front of him was tossed to the dirt like a rag doll, his leg snapped in two.

Carol Murff White was 5 years old that day. She remembers her house shaking.

“It was pretty scary,” the resident of Palm Harbor, Fla., said. She and her husband were in town for a family wedding when she heard The Daily News was planning a group photo of disaster survivors.

“I was young then and didn’t understand the scope of the disaster,” she said. “It changed everything for a lot of people.”

Just three weeks after the second deadliest explosion in the city’s history, the thoughts of survivors and their families who came out to the reunion photo were not far from those killed or injured in the March 23 blast at BP.

“The 1947 explosion taught us all many lessons,” said Don Carroll, Ponce’s son-in-law. While not a survivor, the former Amoco and BP supervisor volunteers time at the photo shoot each year to honor those who survived and saw the city rebuild.

“Sometimes these things are unavoidable because it takes something like (the 1947 blast) to remind us that there is no such thing as totally safe,” he said. “These older people we are seeing today, they had the stamina to rebuild and work to make things safer. That’s the lesson we should learn from as we rebuild after the BP explosion.”