AUXILIARY AT TEXAS CITY

Photo: U.S. Coast Guard 

U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Iris, a lighthouse tender, at Texas City Disaster.

Photo: Texas State Library
Aerial view illustrates scale of disaster.

Photo: Texas History
U.S. Coast Guardsmen work water turret atop cutter at Texas City.

By Vinny Del Giudice

The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Iris raced to Texas City, Texas, after the SS Grandcamp, a freighter laden with ammonium nitrate fertilizer, caught fire and exploded at her berth on the morning of April 16, 1947 - leveling the industrial port and killing more than 500 people.

U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary flotillas from Galveston and Houston augmented active duty Coast Guard personnel, with 40 members of the Galveston flotilla assigned to duty aboard cutter Iris during the course of the recovery effort, according to a May 1, 1948, report by U.S. Coast Guard Headquarters, Washington, D.C. 

The community's first line of defense was obliterated when the blast, which erupted at 9:15 a.m., killed 27 members of Texas City Volunteer Fire Department. Three volunteer firefighters from Texas City Heights also died in the explosion.

The fire alarm was turned in about an hour earlier, and firefighters had stretched hose lines and played water on the freighter as it belched smoke in shades of yellow, orange and gold. 

Cutter Iris arrived at the Texas City waterfront at 10:40 a.m. and took on the injured and dead. The Galveston auxiliarists also manned smaller Coast Guard boats, "increasing the personnel on these boats to official strength," according to a Coast Guard investigation of the disaster, dated Sept. 24, 1947.

The Houston auxiliarists provided their personal vessels for relief work.

Texas City's telephone operators were on strike that morning, causing a delay in summoning help from other communities. As word spread, fire engines, ambulances, doctors, nurses and morticians answered. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers responded, too, with stores of relief supplies and a field kitchen.

Associated Press reporter William C. Barnard described Texas City as "a city of flames, torn steel, and smoking rubble, a city where the dead are uncounted and the living are too dazed and weary to cry." The United Press said "no casualty figure could be much better than a guess" in the immediate aftermath.
At 1:10 a.m. the next day, there was another explosion, this time aboard the freighter SS High Flyer, damaged in the initial blast and also carrying ammonium nitrate.
The cutter Iris (WLB-395) was a lighthouse tender commissioned in 1944. Iris served Galveston - about 15 miles from Texas City - from 1944 until 1972 when it was assigned to Astoria, Oregon.

 In 1987, Iris responded to another disaster of historic proportions - the grounding of the oil tanker Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound, Alaska, according to the U.S.  Maritime Administration. Iris also responded to a 1970 oil rig fire in the Gulf of Mexico, southeast of Galveston. 
  

Photo: Texas History
U.S. Coast Guard tugboat fights fires at Texas City Disaster in April 1947.

Photo: IAFF Local 1259 Texas City firefighters, the first line of defense, dockside to SS Grandcamp.

Photo: Texas History View of Texas City blast from Galveston, about 15 miles away.

Photo: Texas History S.S. Grandcamp ablaze moments before catastrophe.

Photo: Moore Memorial Public Library Ruins of the Monsanto Company building near Texas City docks. Monsanto was a chemical manufacturer.

Photo: IAFF 1259 Firefighters from Houston arrive in Texas City.

Photo: Moore Memorial Public Library Aerial view of the Port of Texas City before the disaster.