The Galveston County Daily News

Laura Baumgartner gets chills when the firefighters’ bell tolls after her grandfather’s name is called.

“I can’t help it, I get a chill knowing her served in honor and that makes me proud,” said Baumgartner. “Then emptiness. Knowing about this person, but never getting to know him.”

Baumgartner’s grandfather was Henry “H.J.” Baumgartner, the chief of the Texas City fire department. He was leading his brigade in the fight against the blaze aboard the ship Grandcamp on April 16, 1947.

When that ship exploded the entire fire department was wiped out and this town changed forever.

For the past 57 years, the memories of Baumgartner, the Texas City firefighters and the everyday citizens killed in the series of explosions that became known as the Texas City Disaster are memorialized by the city.

Comparing the weather Friday to that of the city 57 years ago, Mayor Carlos Garza presided over the events which included a keynote speech from his aunt Ernestine Garza Moreno.

“(Thursday) we dedicated the new International Terminal at shoal Point and dedicate its construction to the memory and spirit of those who died and those who survived the disaster,” said Garza.

The ceremony included too a dedication to the firefighters killed in the blast. With each name, Texas City’s bravest stood at attention and the bell tolled.

The most moving moment of the event came when survivors in attendance, walked to the memorial fountain to lay white carnations at the base of a wreath honoring the fallen.

As has become tradition, the survivors and firefighters are left along while observers watch from a distance as if to pay respect for the moment.

On this day however, there was a bit extra. An impromptu dedication in honor of Chief Baumgartner.

The current group of Texas City firefighters was able to obtain the chief’s badges. Plans call for the insignias to be placed on loan at the Texas City museum.

For Laura Baumgartner, now the city’s director of Tourism and Recreation, Friday was the first opportunity to see the badges.

“Those have always been in the possession of my uncle,” she said. “This is the first time I have been able to actually touch something that was so much a part of what he did for this city.”

The Texas City Disaster was a series of explosions at the docks on Monsanto in 1947. A French ship named Grandcamp had caught fire, a blaze that eventually ignited a hold full of ammonium nitrate.

Another ship, with similar cargo called the High Flyer exploded some time later. The blasts destroyed much of the city’s petrochemical complex, leveled several buildings and created tidal waves that killed scores.

More than 650 people were killed as a result. For years, the Texas City Disaster was known as the worse man-made disaster in recorded history, until the events of Sept. 11, 2001 when planes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon during terrorist attacks.