CITY ON FIRE

Texas-based journalist and Bush family biographer Minutaglio (First Son, 1999, etc.) grimly describes a horrifying disaster that revealed grave negligence in the post-WWII manufacturing sector.

Based on 200 interviews with survivors, shrewdly focused on a group of key figures, Minutaglio’s account provides a highly personalized portrait of the tragedy that struck Texas City, Texas, in 1947. With ominous verisimilitude, he portrays a deeply segregated boomtown beholden to the companies whose factories created high employment, in return for which they received much municipal largesse. In 1947, Texas City’s youthful war-hero mayor and a firebrand priest were collaborating on unheard-of social changes, levying taxes on Monsanto, Union Carbide, Amoco, and other corporations, improving conditions for the African-American and Hispanic laborers crowded into “The Bottom” near the putrid waterfront and chemical plants. That spring, the US government began shipping ammonium nitrate fertilizer to Europe through Texas City without alerting locals to the danger of explosion that had caused neighboring ports to ban the substance. On April 16 a fire in the French-crewed ship Grandcamp grew uncontrollably; its colorful smoke drew many observers to the waterfront, where they died by the hundreds when 51,000 bags of ammonium nitrate (unmarked as hazardous) exploded at 9:12 a.m. This caused a tidal wave, sprayed steel shrapnel across the town, and set off numerous secondary explosions of fuel and chemical tanks. The Monsanto plant became an inferno, and that night a second fertilizer-laden ship exploded. The city’s inadequate public services (it didn’t even have a fireboat) were no match for the emergency. Imaginatively using the multiple perspectives to depict the tragedy and its devastating aftermath, Minutaglio conveys a punchy, noir-ish sense of the period. His conclusion is ambiguously uplifting. The survivors’ class-action suit against the government, initially championed by an ultra-conservative judge, was delayed for years in appellate court. Finally, in 1955, special legislation granted them limited relief.

An ugly but necessary meditation on our checkered military-industrial history.