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During WWII, my dad worked as a pipe fitter foreman, helping build most of the petrochem plants in Texas City.

In April of 1947, I was in the 4th grade in Webster, Texas -- and the shock wave from the Grandcamp explosion knocked art supplies off of our desks. While I was picking my stuff up, lots of kids ran to the windows, saw the mushroom cloud, and shouted, "An A-Bomb!"

I took one look at the orange cloud, (which looked like the fumes in the top of a nitric acid bottle) and, said, "Nope -- that's a chemical explosion. Probably at the Monsanto plant..."

Soon the smoke turned dark brown, then black -- so, it was obvious that some of the oil refineries and/or tank farms were involved.

The school shut down and bussed us all home -- to clear the narrow Old Galveston Highway for emergency traffic.

~~~~~~~~~~~

So -- as soon as I saw that reddish-orange smoke column in Beirut, photos, I knew, "Ammonium Nitrate!"

Texas City was a big one: 2.3 KT of AN -- and Beirut was bigger: 2.75 KT.

As you posted, much of the damage/death in TC was from shrapnel -- or whole slabs of 1" thick ship hull plating... Plus, the whole industrial end of town was one big firebomb -- waiting to blow... Worse, with the exception of one man who was on vacation, the Grandcamp blast wiped out all the firemen and equipment of the Texas City Fire Department...

TXnMA