4.16.47: A survivor looks back at the Texas City Explosion.
THE MORNING OF APRIL 16, 1947 was like any other in the life of a then 8-year-old Betty
Calhoun. As she went to school on the chilly Wednesday morning in Texas City, events at the
Port of Texas City would place her front and center of the deadliest industrial accident in
American history.
Calhoun was in class at 9:12am when the French ship Grandcamp’s ammonium nitrate
exploded, causing a 15-foot wave of death and destruction. Now 80, Calhoun shared her
experience of that fateful day with The Post Newspaper Associate Editor Brandon C. Williams:
“It was real chilly that morning, and the flames were orange, and everyone was looking at the
flames and smoke. Even the kids (in class) were. They had those old manila shades that rolled
up and down, and those were at my back. The chairs were facing the opposite direction. The
windows and the manila shades all blew over the place.
“When the stairs collapsed, I was upstairs, and the school was all blown to pieces. The kids tried
to push me off where there were no more stairs. It was just a cloud of dust. It was granite stairs
and it had all crumbled, and it was just like smoke.”
With all hell breaking loose, Calhoun then realized her best chance of survival would come from
facing one of her biggest fears.
“They were pushing in panic – and we were little kids — and I squatted down and behind the
legs and I went down the hall. I went down a metal…it was like a slide from upstairs and I was
scared of heights, but I went down that metal slide and I went under the oak trees and down
the sidewalk to 6 th Street and I crossed over to where the hat shop and Penney’s and all of that
was.
“My parents told me that if anything happens and we can’t pick you up, you go to the police
station. I walked through all that broken glass. My feet were so full of broken glass that (later) I
kept begging the nuns to quit digging because my feet were so full of glass. I was so scared that
didn’t realize I was walking through all that glass. I made my way through all of that and got to
city hall, and I went upstairs.
It was there that Calhoun – who would eventually become Miss Texas City – remained despite
the chaos and tragedy that surrounded the then-second grader.
“I went into the police station and I was the only one there. Because my feet were bleeding and
hurting, I sat up on the dais and looked out the windows that weren’t there anymore because
the glass was all gone. I sat there, and I sat there and nobody there, but that’s what I did
because that’s what I was told to do.
“There was a little girl that had been scalped. She had a puppy in her arms and she was saying
to anybody, ‘take my dog.’ She had no top to her head. You couldn’t nothing because her face
was dried up with blood and the top of her head was gone. I had never seen anything like that
before.
So, I took the little dog and kept it until that night.”
Calhoun would remain there for several hours until her ordeal of being alone came to an end
after dark.
“My mother found me. My daddy was in the explosion and was underwater and under the
building, but he survived. My mother was a nurse at that time and was on 6 th Street and then
went to the hospital looking for both of us. They told her we weren’t there, but she had to stay
because they needed her. They tried to make her stay, but she told them, ‘I have to find my
husband and my daughter,’ so she left.
With death and destruction throughout Texas City, the Calhouns looked for a place to recoup
that night. However, it would not take long for their plans to remain in Texas City to become
altered.
“That night, they told us the second ship was about to blow up and we needed to leave town.
My mother and my dad and I went to the Catholic church in Dickinson on 517 and the corner.
It was there, that finally, she received treatment for her glass-riddled feet.
“Most of my feet had puncture wounds. The glass was so embedded that it turned white. I had
ballerina slippers on that day. I didn’t know if I had them on still. I just remember looking at my
feet and there was blood on the floor. I may not have had my shoes on at that time, I don’t
know.”
Like many in the area, the Calhouns were able to eventually begin life anew. Betty Calhoun
never left the area, as she lived in Texas City for years before finding her way to her current
home in Santa Fe. Hurricane Harvey caused considerable damage to her home, including the
loss of manuscripts of her father’s experience of that fateful day.
