The Texas City Disaster of 1947 | Episode 107

No one shows up to work expecting to make history. So imagine you're at work and you make one small, irreversible decision that created one of the worst days at work in US history. If that Fork in the Road moment had played out in any other way, today's episode would mostly just be me chatting up Texans, May Texas and offering up some gardening tips. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, you will find out why parts of Texas smell like money, and why that money smells unbreathably, pungent and caustic. We will explore how there can come a point where calling something loud loses all meaning and then your skin blows off. And we will learn about a disaster so catastrophic that when people said, well, I'm glad that's all over with, they were treated to an encore. And if you were listening on Patreon, you would hear about a river or two that defied convention by bursting into flames. You would learn about the time a German industrial site tried to fly into space because its standard operating procedures director was actually a potted plant wearing a tie, And you would find out how British petroleum basically became the beatles of boil and gas disasters. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learned something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said. Shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. There is hardly a place left on the planet that remains pristine and untouched. We change, alter, or destroy everything we see. And when I was trying to think of the greatest examples of an unimposing plot of land being transformed into something unrecognizable, I decided on Dubai. For most of history, Dubai was an underpopulated little pearl diving community and trading port. It sits at the far end of the Persian Gulf, just sandwich between the United Arab Emirates and Oman. It sits near the point where the Persian Gulf pinches to meet the Gulf of Oman at the Strait of Hormuz. Maybe you've heard about it. It was basically known as home to a little trading port that was right up until oil was discovered and all of a sudden they were going to become like Beverly Hill Billy Ridge. The thing was, Dubai's leadership at the time understood that oil isn't forever. They weren't going to be able to compete with powerhouses like Saudi Arabia, so they didn't try. Instead of becoming just another oil state, I used their oil money as startup capital to glow up into a kind of place known for luxury shopping and ultramodern architecture and a top shelf nightlife scene, the playground of international playboys, the kind of place where even the police drive around in Bugattis. Someone pointed out that Paris accumulated all of its prestige and wealth over hundreds and hundreds of years, but Dubai basically won the lottery in nineteen sixty six and used its bank card to pull off the same trick in decades. The place looks like someone took every visible symbol of wealth and opulence and blew it all up on an architectural scale. Everything is brighter and cleaner and more expensive looking than it needs to be. And I'm not even bringing up the man made islands and indoor skiing. And I'm sorry, but I'm gonna have to take back those mimosas we won't actually be spending our time in Dubai today. No, in fact, today we'll be spending our time in a different settlement along a different coast. Today we are traveling all the way to Texas, to a town called Beaumont. In nineteen oh one oil was found and they had the same hyperventilating into a bag. Oh god, oh god, were rich reaction as people would later have in Dubai. Instead of shakes riding on top of gold plated lambous like aquaman riding a stingray, the nouveau riche of Yule, Texas became caricatures of rutin tutin gun totein cigar chewin, big gas mustache, kind of spitting in a spatoon, kind of filled tycoon type in big hats. It hadn't taken long for oil derricks to dot the landscape like trees, and every drop was transported to refinery towns to be broken down into fuels and other petrochemicals. Texas City was a refinery town, uniquely set up with a deep water port, sitting between Galveston and Houston, along the western shore of Galveston Bay, right off the Gulf of Mexico, with easy access to the Atlantic and Pacific. The myth of the place was that it was discovered by a pair of hunters from Minnesota who, by divine providence or whatever, stumbled upon a vast and somehow overlooked shoreline and declared upon this land a mighty port shall rise. In reality, the area had already been carefully surveyed and selected by speculators as part of a complicated land redevelopment project to turn a marshy Bay and some barrier islands into an industrial petrochemical wonderland. That's not a great origin story, which is why they create these legends, to soften them and make them appear maybe a little less aggressively corporate. And what started as a place to just refine and transport oil quickly ballooned into a place to refine and transport everything. The whole area was leveled and paved and proactically paint rolled with refineries and chemical plants, some cargo cranes and grain elevators and storage tanks, and factories and rail lines, all operating in close proximity in a kind of a one stop shop set up. Everything they made was connected by rail or pipeline and shipping, and immediately available to the rest of the world. When World War II broke out in Europe, aircraft factories in California or tank plants in the Midwest might have been the photogenet cover girls of the American war effort, but chemical production was arguably way more crucial. The demand for synthetics and fuels and chemicals for explosives shot through the roof, and the US government poured barrels of cash into expanding its production, especially ammonia. I'll tell you the only three things I know about ammonia. It has an electric catpiss smell to it. It was needed to produce the millions of munitions being sent over seas, and because of its high nitrogen content, it is also used as the fertilizer for growing the tremendous amount of food needed to keep millions of soldiers fat and happy. Well, maybe not fat. Or happy but fed. When the fighting finally stopped in nineteen forty five, fields across Europe had already been plowed over as dramatically as possible, and they needed to rebuild its agriculture immediately to prevent food shortages. So production increasingly switched to converting surplus explosives grade ammonium nitrate into fertilizer. From there it was bagged, loaded onto ships and sent over seas. The port at Texas City had literally shipped out millions and millions of pounds of the stuff for years. On the morning of April sixteenth, nineteen forty seven, Texas City looked like any other busy port town along the Gulf coast. Men shouted to be heard over the winches and engines and machines, all moving in unison, moving goods between tankers and freighters, and train cars and trucks, cranes, swinging cargo nets overhead, filled with sacks and crates and drums of everything you could imagine, fertilizer, fuel, chemicals, grain, all of it guided by shouts and hand signals. There was this constant pressure to move load and ship materials around the clock. The work was relentless and physical and sometimes dangerous, but it paid well enough, and Txas city was growing because of it. Wait, what kind of dangers do you ask host cracksknuckles? Let's see. Probably the most common hazard was falling. Cargo loads were lifted by cranes and nets or slings, but if something shifted a few hundred pounds. Falling from even a short height would cancel your birth certificate then unemploy you from your body. If a crane's rigging failed, like a cable snapped, or a hook slipped, or a winch malfunctioned, you could be teed off the dock by swinging cargo or slashed in TwixT by a whippy's cable. Not to mention the number of people regularly crushed between a moving load and a bulkhead or a railcar or a dock edge. You could be speared to the chest by a forklift, or have your clothing catching something that cartoonishly crushed as all your limbs. Long shift in the heat while lifting heavy loads on greasy or oily catwalks could always lead to falls, and most working class never learned to swim, so workers who fell off into the harbor sometimes drowned. The portlands was a busy place, a twenty four hour operation, and a bit of a mechanical monster, where towers and flaming pipe stacks and the aroma of sulfur and gasoline blanket the whole area. Today you'd call it a bit of an ocean nightmare, but thousands depended on it for work, even though potential danger was everywhere. Still, the men who worked there knew that they were part of keeping America going, and there was a kind of pride in it. I think I already said that our story today takes place April the sixteenth, nineteen forty seven, but I wouldn't have told you that it was a Wednesday. Back during World War II, a little something called the Liberty Ship Program produced thousands of cargo vessels to support the Allied war effort, and the French cargo vessel called the SS Grand Camp was a product of that drive. After retiring from the war, she moved to France and was now operating as a merchant cargo ship. And today she found herself sitting board at the docks at Texas City. At peer oh to the men loading cargo on the Texas City docks, the sacks of fertilizers stacked in the grand camp's holes looked no different from thousands of other shipments that they had handled every year. The ship was already partially loaded with just over forty six thousand, one hundred pound bags of ammonium nitrate, with more cargo being brought in from nearby railway cars. Cranes and winches lowered the paper wrap sacks into her hold while the longshoremen and the crew skittered about in a kind of workplace choreography. Everything was perfect. That was until shortly after eight o'clock that morning, when someone noticed smoke drifting from the ship. At first it was faint, just thin gray wisps escaping from the Number four cargo hold. Dock workers investigated and somehow a fire had started somewhere deep inside the hold of Number four. Crew threw some water and emptied a couple of fire extinguishers at it, but to no avail, and by the time a hose was dragged over, the smoke had become so thick that everyone was ordered out. The rest of the. Cargo consisted of nothing unusual twine, peanuts, drilling equipment, you know, tobacco, cotton, oh ammunition. Now the crew had already begun ripping cases of ammo out of Hold number five, but the smoke forced them out. Two whistles and sirens of alarm started echoing throughout the portlands as fire trucks started to arrive. Dockworkers, firefighters and civilians had run towards the destruction to pull strangers from the rubble of burning buildings and oil soaked water, and makeshift triage stations popped up at schools and private homes and even along sidewalks. These men approached the ship thinking they were dealing with a routine cargo fire and they had to decide how to handle it. Firefighters set up hooses to cool the ship's deck, but as soon as the water hit it, it vaporized into steam. Firefighters boarded the ship and began spring water, but the captain of the grand camp, a man named Charles Douguzdan, reportedly ordered the water stock because ammonium nitrate is as expensive as it is valuable, and if they flooded the hold with water, the fertilizer. Would be ruined. The captain of. The fire response countered that if they just sealed the area and then pumped steam inside, that should smother the flames and rob the fire of its beloved oxygen. It may sound weird, but it wasn't. It was a classic industrial tactic that they call steam fire suppression. They turn the air into something the fire can't breathe. The captain of. The Grand Camp nodded emphatically in agreement to that idea. Meanwhile, back on dry land on the dock, everyone from newspaper boys to popcorn salesmen to nearby refinery workers poured into the area to watch one hell of a show. Around a thirty the grown pressure from all the compressed steams started blowing off hatch covers and the ship started hemorrhaging a thick column of golden, yellowy orange smoke high into the sky. Witnesses said it actually was unexpectedly beautiful. That was until nine to twelve a m. When a violent detonation erupted from within the ship as a massive flash, followed by a deafening blast that shook the entire region. The overpressure and heat from the blast disintegrated the bodies of the firefighters and ship's crew still on board. The Grand Camp was fundamentally deconstructed and thrown in every available direction sending steel shards slicing through the crowds of curious onlookers at hundreds of miles barrower and then scattering them to the four winds. There was a Monsanto plant located just immediately across from where the Grand Camp was destroyed, and when it was immediately destroyed, another one hundred and forty five shift workers were lost with it. The shockwave alone flattened buildings along the waterfront. Railcars and machinery, and even chunks of the ship's hull were thrown a mile or more away from the blast. Over five thousand tons of steel had been hurled across the harbor and into the city. Steel plates weighing tons crashed down onto freight cars and vehicles, and humes and businesses for whole minutes. Flaming hot debris rained down over nearby neighborhoods, adding to the number of casualties and sparking new fires. Incredibly, one of the ship's anchors was thrown about three kilometers or two miles away from the ship, and those anchors weighed about four thousand pounds each, but somehow was able to fly through the air with the greatest of ease, coming to rest near a refinery north of the harbor, and slamming into the ground with enough force to create a fifteen foot or five meter wide crater ten feet or three meters deep. A wave of water four and a half meters or fifteen feet tall, was thrust from the slit by the force of the blast and swept a large steel barge ashore, and then dragged the dead and the injured helplessly into the churning basin of water. As it receded, a huge mushroom cloud marked ground zero, billowing more than six hundred meters or two thousand feet into the air. Even airplanes were affected, as you can imagine. The column of smoke coming from the burning ship drew all kinds of attention, and that included pilots who found themselves circling overhead to get a better look when the ship unexpectedly detonated and when the pressure away from the blast hit them. Some planes were jolted and thrown hundreds of feet off their flightpath, but thankfully, the only control that they lost were their bowels. Others said they had been flipped or stalled out, but no one crashed. As shrapnel bombarded buildings, tanks of flammable liquids at nearby refineries ripped open, failing catastrophically and spilling thousands of gallons of flammable material that spread quickly and fed a chain reaction of fire and smaller explosions. Chemical facilities in similar conditions lost mixed hydrocarbons and benzene derivatives and sulfuric compounds, all kinds of things, some of which ignited into an uncontrolled chemical inferno. For motorists driving along the Houston Galveston Highway, the towering smoke column gave them pause for thought about maybe skipping their trip to thirteen kilometers or eight miles away across the water in Galveston, people were thrown to the pavement and covered in glass as storefront windows shattered, buildings swayed in towns twice that far away. Back in Texas City, Stunned townspeople soon encountered hordes of the oil and blood soaked staggering away from the smoke. In the flames, they became the priority, so no one really noticed when a cargo ship named the s S High Flyer started drifting. She'd been tied up in the adjoining slip to the Grand Camp and the force of the explosion tore her free from her moorings, and now she was just drifting away, eventually coming to rest against another ship, the Wilson B Keene. She was pretty messed up from the blast, and many of her crew were still on board for maybe an hour until they were forced to abandon ship by the flames growing all around her. Considering each of the thousands of bags of sulfur and ammonium nitrates sitting in her hull weighed one hundred pounds, they were not going to be able to remove nearly enough before fleeing, so two thousand tons of sulfur and one thousand tons of ammonium nitrate sat waiting and heating, just like the Grand Camp before her. A little later, two men boarded her and noticed flames coming from one of her holds. Emergency workers were able to cut her anchorchain and use tugboats to pull her away. From the docks. That was until the hold started looking like flamethrower school. Everyone ran off. The ship, the lines were cut, and the tugs raised for it. The first explosion we described destroyed all of the city's firefighting equipment, including the power and waterlines, which left the city helpless, which is exactly what you do not want. As shortly after one a m. The high flier exploded with a punch that only worsened the damage, destroying even more tanks of crude oil and chemicals that spread flames to other structures that were previously spared from the inferno, not to mention all of the new, glowing hot pieces of debris that scattered even more fire and death. Literally. The only plus side was that her shockwave would have been ever so slightly slower at mock three or only twenty two hundred miles or nine hundred and eighty kilometers an hour, so that was nice. The emergency response was enormous. All branches of the military, the National Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers, fire and police departments from surrounding states, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, Hell even the Boy and Girl Scouts showed up. Galvison District personnel brought in equipment and first aid supplies while transporting the dead and injured to morgues and hospitals, which were quickly overwhelmed. More than five hundred people had been killed and thousands more were injured. Entire neighborhoods had been flattened by the blasts, with over one thousand buildings destroyed or severely damaged. Temporary morgues were established to handle the large number of victims, which for some families in Texas City counted entire generations lost in a single morning. So what happened, well, under normal conditions, ammonium nitrate is quite stable, but add heat and it can start to decompose wildly, like violently. Also, it happens to be an oxidizer, meaning that it actually feeds its own fire by producing oxygen. Also, it had been packed into wax coated paper sacks, which technically are their own fuel. The hatches were closed and they attempted to smother the fire with steam, which was not a bad idea, and they had done this kind of thing in the past, But with this cargo, the steam did nothing to cool it, so the heat and pressure continued to rise. They did what they thought was the right thing, but they were hoping it was the right thing for them, not the fire it created. The exact conditions ammonium nitrate needs to kick into high gear from burning to detonating. That was about twenty three hundred tons of ammonium nitrate. That's roughly equivalent to about one kill a ton or a thousand tons of TNT, give or take picture something comparable to the twenty twenty explosion in Beirut, which you can find. Very easily on YouTube. And the scale that saw a little harder to understand is that this was maybe one fifteenth the size of the explosion at Hiroshima, which literally happened only two years earlier. You can only imagine what something strong enough to shatter glass miles away would do to you up close. If this detonation had the power to shred steel, it was more than prepared to tear apart the portlands and de meet you right down to the skeleton without blinking. Another point is that the loudest thing that almost everyone will ever hear in their lives is lightning, which can get up to around one hundred and twenty decibels. Now, what happened here was something that you could hear two hundred and forty kilometers or one hundred and fifty miles away. So the best guesses available is that this explosion may have been over two hundred decibels, and calling that loud at that point it's not even sound. It's just a battering force on the human body. The shockwave was an incredibly dense wall of compressed air, moving faster than sound, exerting tens of thousands of pounds of force on anything it's spread across, which it would have starting a round mock four, which is about thirty one hundred miles or just under five thousand kilometers an hour, and that is followed by blast winds and steel fragments and glass and stappable debris of every size and description not far behind. You probably don't know this, but explosions and detonations are not the same thing. Explode is kind of a catch all term for anything that erupts from a container under pressure, where all of the energy is released in a single pop. When something detonates, the energy released is almost instant, and the resulting shock wave moves faster than sound, and a wall of pressurized air hits you before you even know it. Oh and buildings hate it too, And only then does the sound arrive. But of course by that time you've probably ruptured your ear drums, and from there a blizzard of metal, glass, wood, body parts, whatever, all of it pincushioning or decapitating you. The question is would you know what to do? The sequence is exactly how you might imagine flash, pressure, wave, sound, debris, a lifetime of injuries and reconstructive surgery. I'm not going to promise you would survive with your eyelids intact, but I will help you with some best practices to help you live to tell the tale while they staple your scalp back down during the initial blast. Distance is your biggest friend. So an explosion drops off rapidly with distance, So the further away you are can make the difference between fatal and survivable injuries. And just so it said, avoiding industrial or fuel storage sits is a pretty good rule of thumb. But even if you were beside a dairy queen, actually if you're beside a dairy queen, my advice is to run inside and get away from the windows. In fact, whatever your situation is, wherever it is you find yourself, you want to put as many walls between you and the source of the blast as you can. But let's say dairy queen is locked. Well, that changes nothing, and the best thing you can now do is to get low and huddle behind something solid. Laying flat on your stomach with your face down and your feet pointed towards the blast is the move. Cover your ears with your hands or arms, and keep your mouth open to equalize the pressure. In fact, doing that simple step can even help keep your ear drums intact if this had happened and your ear drums exploded. Now that the blast has passed safely, I want you to make a thumbs up with one fist and place it in the palm of your other hand. And now just pull both of those hands towards your chest. Now you know the sign language. For help me. Your skull is surprisingly interconnected and complicated, so keep it pointed away from the blast, and do whatever you can to protect your face and throat. A concrete wall or even the engine block of a vehicle would probably be the most common and strongest thing that you could find quickly. If you're old enough to remember what a ditch is. Even throwing yourself into a depression in the ground can offer some degree of relief as the blast passes. By hiding behind in simple drywall is no better than hiding behind glass. I mean, it probably won't hurt quite as much, but it's not going to provide any real protection. Now, let's assume that you listened as hard as you could, but it was a pretty stressful situation. So you've done everything wrong and now you look like a pincushion modeling sample pieces from half the sections at home depot. You won't have a receipt, so don't even bother worrying about returning anything or even removing it, because that always leads to bleeding or worse, squirting, and you can only do that for so long, so I do not encourage it. Use anything clean you can find to put pressure on the spot or spots to reduce bleeding. And if that spot is awkward, like maybe a chunk of PBC pipe is sticking through your thigh, use what however you have available to act as a tourniquet. What you want to do is tie something around your limb, just slightly above the wound, which can be hard to picture. So really, what I'm saying is in between your heart and the whole. Join me on Patreon this month and I will mail you a tourniquet inside of a personalized barf bag. This is a limited time offer which is open to residents of every continent and expires whenever I run out of tourniquets, which probably will be never, I'm serious, Try me right from as far away as you can and just see what happens. Now, if the blast injured your lungs, like, maybe you end up having trouble catching your breath instead of coughing blood, what you want to do is keep sitting upright or slightly elevated, stay calm, and breathe slowly. Don't tempt them. This is one those injuries where the best thing to apply is a phone call to emergency services. Don't panic. You should always believe you are going to be okay, provided you aren't bleeding internally. I think, beside glass injuries, brain injuries are probably the second most common injuries. I could probably write an entire book about all of the symptoms. So let's say, even though you're not a doctor, if it seems obvious like their pupils keep changing sizes or they think their name is Hash Browns, they probably have at minimum a concussion. They may have a brain injury. You'll probably want to lay them down, being very careful with their head and neck, because anything that hit their head hard enough may have also injured their spine, and if they're unconscious, you're going to want to help guide them into the recovery position. You lay them down, roll them onto one side, tilt their head back, bend their top knee kind of like a kickstand with their mouth facing down. It's effectively the same position you might put them in if you were trying to make sure they weren't going to choke on their own barf. Long story short, survival often comes down to your position and distance and how robust your shielding might be. And incredibly, inside of five hundred feet of the center of the blast, one hundred and twelve people actually survived, each of them owing their survival to again their shielding, or orientation, or distance, or just luck. Only scattered pieces of the grand camp, all plating and machinery were ever recovered. Seismographs across the region even recorded the blast with an estimated magnitude between three point five and four on the Richter scale for an earthquake that small, but for an explosion, and combined with the sound, it would have been more than adequate to empty bowels at a distance. The explosion at Texas City was the result of the fire, but the exact cause of the fire was never conclusively determined. Most believe the whole thing was the result of a longshoreman that reportedly had been seen smoking near the hold earlier that morning. You never know, but throwing an errant but into the hold could have unknowingly started a very slow, smoldering fire deep in the hold where the smoke was first noticed. Firefighters attempted to save the cargo by sealing the hold and injecting it with steam, which became a sad example of well intense fire fighting tactics making a situation worse. The problem was that almost nobody at the time understood exactly how ammonium nitrate behaved in a confined fire. Most fires suffocate when oxygen runs out, but ammonium nitrate actually produces its own oxygen when it decomposes in the heat. Sealing the hold trapped that heat and pressure inside with it, which led to the runaway decomposition and of ventual detonation. Observers saw yellow orange smoke, which suggests nitrogen dioxide, which is produced when this stuff burns, and it's plenty toxic. As the heat and pressure built, the boat became something closer to a giant pressure vessel like a pressure cooker bomb, and to make things worse, in the nineteen forties, ship fires were treated like public spectacles, and this is one reason the death toll was so high. The explosion triggered fires across the port and eventually caused the second ship to explode hours later. The second explosion was smaller, but crueler in a different way. It came after the initial destruction, which was bad timing because it hit rescuers and survivors in the middle of all the chaos. All told, this was an industrial fire of mass detonation, a toxic chemical release, and a second explosion. So really five disasters and one five disasters, where any one of these alone would have been a very respectable disaster on its own. The port, its industrial core, and about a quarter of the city had been completely annihilated, and more than eight thousand individuals and companies had wanted to sue. The one thing the disaster actually created was the first massive industrial insurance lawsuit in history, which ended up going all the way to the Supreme Court. Now, the court ruled that if harm is caused by a policy choice, the government is protected from lawsuits, so that worked out kind of weird. And after that there was the three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania, and the courts ruled that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was off the hook too. When the Axon Valdi spilled about eleven million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound, the government was off the hook about that too, same thing when the Deep Baater Horizon killed eleven workers. Don't get me right. The private companies were still prey to lawsuits. And it's not that the governments that let them loose on society weren't blameable, you just weren't allowed to blame them. The Texas City disaster led to major improvements in chemical safety and hazardous cargo handling, while also handing get out of jail free cards to governmental decision makers. So as disasters go, this one had a real mixed bag of a legacy. Loss of property totaled around one hundred million dollars, which today would be closer to one point five billion. Massive damage had been caused to the petrochemical infrastructure along the Gulf coast, and the loss of property that wasn't going to be cheap. Texas City rebuilt its port and continued operating as a major petrochemical center. After the disaster, new rules were introduced for shipping ammonium nitrate, labeling hazardous cargo, and of course firefighting procedures around chemical materials. And I don't just mean what techniques for what kind of fires. I mean like when it's time to just say nope, trying to save cargo is no longer considered acceptable. In a strange twist of history, the same Gulf Coast chemical industry grew even larger after this, becoming the world's largest concentration of petrochemical production. One of the Texas City volunteer fire departments lost nearly its entire crew when many of them climbed aboard the Grand Camp shortly before the blast. Their deaths became one of the most devastating losses of firefighters in American history. Part of the tragedy was that this happened in a town whose economy was almost entirely dependent on the very infrastructure that was destroyed, So this led to obvious trickle down effects. If there's anything resembling a bright side, it's when everything exploded. People didn't scatter, They stayed and they helped, and the rescue and relief efforts that they made here helped inform and shape disaster response to this day. The exact number of people killed will probably never be known. It is believed that five hundred and seventy six people were killed, with only three hundred and ninety eight being identified. One hundred and seventy eight people were listed as missing. Sixty three bodies of the unidentified were buried in a memorial cemetery and park. The number of injured ranged in the thousands, and to this day, the Texas City disaster of nineteen forty seven remains the deadliest industrial disaster in US history. I almost ran out of time to tell you that Texas is a fine place, Hey, Texas, but if you had to pick a part to visit, Texas City might not be it. Texas City has some of the densest petrochemical infrastructure on the planet, and a lot of it is old. So it stands to reason this is the kind of place that's going to have more surprise help wanted posters than places you're used to. I've never heard it described as cursed, but the nineteen forty seven disaster was hardly the only time this town mass teleported souls to heaven. They have had. Countless smaller fires and leaks and explosions over the decades. There was an entire storage tank fire in nineteen eighty seven, there was the VP refinery explosion, in two thousand and five, the Marathon Oil refinery ate it and twenty eighteen. I mean, the list just goes on and on, and all of it goes to support my India China argument. I always argue that if there was a specifically weird kind of serial killer that kept livers as prizes in Canada, China and India have thirty five times our population, so that stands to reason that they would have dozens of liver burglars. And it doesn't have to be liver, could be noses or genitals or faces or whatever you're most comfortable with. At this time, I'd like to apologize to Kyla Clark and be Boop and anyone really who was upset at the death of the fundraiser that she began to help replace the cost of the computer for this show. I really don't know what happened. I do apologize, and when it comes to this kind of stuff, I have the same technical potential as my cat and I probably won't do this again for everyone else. It is at this time that I say to you, if your place of work never turns into heat and gas and light brighter than the sun, taking your life and finances with it, and you wanted to find a way to celebrate, why not consider helping out the show by joining us at patreon dot com slash funeral kazoooo add free episodes, extra content, behind the scenes stuff, safety stuff, whatever it is you need. I confess that I have trouble finding the ability to do this show, and donations from people like thank you are the only reason that I have been able to do it as often as I have. The majority of supporters just sign up to make a small monthly donation and then they just go quiet, and that's fine. Maybe you hear me enough on the show and it doesn't matter. I appreciate you all for it. And alternatively, you could just chose some support at buymea Coffee dot com slash Doomsday with a one time donation, which a lot of people did after the death of the fundraiser, and I can't thank you enough. I would also like to offer a heartfelt shout out to new Patreon supporters Alexis, Carla McCowan, Tracy Spaniels, Jennifer Meredith, Bobby dou Marcy Morris. And Eric Camphor. Yes, it's great to meet you. No, it's not a cult, and we will talk soon. For everyone else, you're always welcome to reach out on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook as Doomsday Podcasts, or just fire me an email to Doomsday pod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave a review and tell your friends. I always thank you all for all of your support and encouragement, but I also always say if you could spare the money and had to choose, I ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Metic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises, and they are often the first and sometimes only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over six million people across eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globomedic dot ca. On the next episode, It's going to be a kind of a weird one. See, people can be pretty choosy about the bands that they like, and they can really dump on the ones they don't. And on the next episode, we will be taking a look at the only band in history to turn the tables and actually take a dump on their haters. It's the Dave. Matthews tour bus disaster of two thousand and four. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.