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On the morning of April 16, 1947, a French cargo ship called the Grandcamp was tied up at the docks in Texas City, Texas. She was a former American Liberty ship, built during World War II and handed to France after the war. Now she was being loaded with around 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, much of it produced at old wartime ordnance plants and headed to help feed a Europe still recovering from the war. Ammonium nitrate is also a key ingredient in explosives. Almost nobody on the docks that morning seemed to fully understand that. Shortly after 8 AM, crew members noticed smoke coming from one of the cargo holds. The captain didn't want to ruin the cargo with water, so he ordered the hatches closed and steam pumped in to smother the fire. It was exactly the wrong thing to do. The heat and pressure built inside the hold, and the smoke pouring out of the ship turned a strange, bright orange. It was beautiful. So people came to watch. Workers stopped what they were doing. Families gathered along the waterfront. Kids at a nearby school pressed against the windows. The Texas City Volunteer Fire Department rushed to the docks and started spraying water on the ship's deck, which was getting so hot the water was boiling off. At 9:12 AM, the Grandcamp exploded. The blast was so powerful it was felt over 100 miles away. It knocked two small planes flying overhead out of the sky. It shattered windows in Galveston, 10 miles across the bay. It sent a wave rolling over the docks and threw burning debris across the city. One of the Grandcamp's anchors, weighing about two tons, was later found more than a mile and a half away, buried in the ground. Steel fragments rained down on the Monsanto chemical plant next door, which went up in flames, along with oil refineries and storage tanks along the waterfront. Of the 28 men in the Texas City Volunteer Fire Department, 27 were killed. They had been standing right next to the ship. And it wasn't over. Docked nearby was another ship, the High Flyer, carrying more ammonium nitrate and sulfur. It caught fire in the chaos. Rescue crews tried for hours to tow it away. They couldn't. Around 1 AM the next morning, the High Flyer exploded too, destroying another ship beside it and leveling more of the port. At least 581 people died, and some estimates run higher. Thousands were injured. Many victims were never identified, and dozens are buried together in a memorial cemetery in Texas City. Some of the people standing closest to the Grandcamp were simply never found. It remains the deadliest industrial accident in American history. Survivors and families sued the federal government, arguing it had been careless in producing, packaging, and shipping the fertilizer. It became one of the first major class action lawsuits against the United States. In 1953 the Supreme Court ruled the government couldn't be held liable. Congress eventually passed a relief bill in 1955 to compensate some of the victims. That two-ton anchor still sits in a memorial park in Texas City today, right where people can walk up and touch it. The bigger lesson apparently didn't stick. Ammonium nitrate would go on to cause disasters around the world for decades afterward, including the massive 2020 explosion in Beirut. But in 1947, it was a small Texas town that learned it first, while half the waterfront stood outside watching the pretty orange smoke.