Good Morning & God Bless To Every One !
Today is April 16, the 106th day of 2014 and there are 259 days left this year where it is another Blessed Day in the pleasure of our service for our Lord here at:
For God’s Glory Alone Ministries !!!
Speaking of Waste !!! – A new report shows that the government has spent nearly $700 million just trying to get people to sign up for Obamacare. That’s just crazy. They could’ve gotten a perfectly good bankrupt solar company for that!!!
So, What Happened Today In 1947?
Fertilizer explosion kills 581 in Texas City, Texas
A giant explosion occurs during the loading of fertilizer onto the freighter Grandcamp at a pier in Texas City, Texas. Nearly 600 people lost their lives and thousands were injured when the ship was literally blown to bits.
Ammonium nitrate was used as an explosive by the U.S. Army in World War II and, after the war ended, production of the chemical continued as its use as a fertilizer became accepted. However, the precautions used in its transport became far more lax in the post-war years.
On April 16, the Grandcamp was being loaded with ammonium nitrate as well as tobacco and government-owned ammunition. Cigarette smoking, although officially banned, was a common practice by longshoremen on the docks. Just two days prior to the explosion, a cigarette had caused a fire on the docks. On the morning of April 16, smoke was spotted deep within one of the Grandcamp‘s holds.
Some water and an extinguisher were used to fight the fire, but hoses were not employed for fear of ruining the cargo; there were already 2,300 tons loaded on the ship. While the ammunition was removed from the ship, the crew attempted to restrict oxygen to the hold in hopes of putting out the fire. Apparently they did not realize that because of ammonium nitrate’s chemical composition, it does not require oxygen in order to burn.
By 9 a.m., flames had erupted from the hold and within minutes it exploded. The blast was heard 150 miles away and was so powerful that the ship’s 1.5- ton anchor was found two miles away. The force of the explosion lifted another ship right out of the water. People working at the docks were killed instantly.
Pieces of flaming debris damaged the oil refineries in the area. A nearby Monsanto chemical storage facility also exploded, killing 234 of the 574 workers there. Nearly all of the survivors were seriously injured. A residential area of 500 homes was also leveled by the blast. Another ship, the High Flyer, which was carrying similar cargo, was pushed completely across the harbor. The crew fled when it came to rest, failing to notice that a fire had started and the next day their ship also exploded. Two people died.
In all, 581 people died and 3,500 were injured. The explosion caused $100 million in damages. A long-disputed court case over the cause of the blast was resolved when Congress granted compensation to 1,394 victims. They received a total of $17 million in 1955. The port was rebuilt to handle oil products only.
Other Memorable Or Interesting Events Occurring On April 16 In History:
1705 – Queen Anne of England knights Isaac Newton;
1738 – Henry Clinton, the future commander in chief of British forces charged with suppressing the rebellion in North America, is born in Newfoundland, Canada. As commander in chief, Clinton was blamed for the loss of the 13 colonies and was replaced by Sir Guy Carleton after the defeat at Yorktown. Afterward, Clinton attempted to rebuild his reputation by publishing his own account of the war. By the time of his death in 1795, he had managed to gain a seat in parliament, the title of general and an appointment as the governor of Gibraltar;
1746 – Prince Charles is defeated at the Battle of Culloden, the last battle on British soil where Royalist troops under the Duke of Cumberland defeat the Jacobite army;
1789 – Newly elected President George Washington leaves his Mount Vernon, Virginia home and heads for New York where he is sworn in as the first American president. Before leaving, Washington addressed a group of citizens in nearby Alexandria, Virginia, to whom he expressed his inner conflict at assuming the role of president. He admitted that he would have preferred to stay in retirement and wondered aloud, “at my age what possible advantages [could I gain] from public life?” Washington was 57 years old when he took leave of his family, friends and staff at the Mount Vernon estate, to which he had retired after leading the Continental Army to victory in the Revolutionary War. The pomp and splendor of the procession did not distract Washington from his anxiety about ruling the country, nor the disappointment of traveling without his beloved wife and closest confidante, Martha, who planned to meet him in New York after the festivities ended. Eight days after leaving Mt. Vernon, Washington arrived in New York, where he gamely set out to “render service to my country with less hope of answering its expectations.” Official inaugural ceremonies commenced on April 30;
1818 – The United States Senate ratifies the Rush-Bagot amendment to form an unarmed U.S.-Canada border;
1863 – In the American Civil War, Union Admiral David Dixon Porter leads 12 ships past the heavy barrage of Confederate artillery at Vicksburg, Mississippi in an operation that speeded General Ulysses S. Grant’s movement against Vicksburg. It took over two hours for the ships and attached barges to pass. The Union lost only one ship and two barges, and Grant’s plan proceeded. Within six weeks, he had locked up Vicksburg from the east and the siege began. Vicksburg would surrender on July 4, 1863;
1881 – In the ‘Old West’, on the streets of Dodge City, famous western lawman and gunfighter Bat Masterson fights the last gun battle of his life. Masterson never again fought a gun battle but the story of the Dodge City shootout and his other exploits ensured Masterson’s lasting fame as an icon of the Old West. He spent the next four decades of his life working as sheriff, operating saloons, and eventually trying his hand as a newspaperman in New York City. The old gunfighter finally died of a heart attack in October 1921 at his desk in New York City;
1897 – Winterbotham, a British secret service official who would play a decisive role in the World War II Ultra code-breaking project, is born on this day. By 1940, British experts broke the German’s Enigma’s code, enabling MI-6 to intercept top secret and highly sensitive messages (even from Hitler himself) transmitted to and between German armed forces. Winterbotham was given the responsibility of distributing the German data, code-named Ultra, to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, among others. Winterbotham was made a Commander of the British Empire in 1943 and was awarded the Legion of Merit in 1945. He died in Blandford, Dorset, in 1990;
1912 – American aviator Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly across the English Channel, traveling from Dover, England, to France in 59 minutes;
1917 – Vladimir Lenin, leader of the revolutionary Bolshevik Party, returns to Petrograd after a decade of exile to take the reins of the Russian Revolution. One month before, Czar Nicholas II had been forced from power when Russian army troops joined a workers’ revolt in Petrograd, the Russian capital. Lenin became the virtual dictator of the world’s first Marxist state;
1922 – Annie Oakley shoots 100 clay targets in a row, setting a woman’s record;
1943 – In Basel, Switzerland, Albert Hoffman, a Swiss chemist working at the Sandoz pharmaceutical research laboratory, accidentally consumes LSD-25, a synthetic drug he had created in 1938 as part of his research into the medicinal value of lysergic acid compounds. After taking the drug, formally known as lysergic acid diethylamide, Dr. Hoffman was disturbed by unusual sensations and hallucinations. After intentionally taking the drug again to confirm that it had caused this strange physical and mental state, Dr. Hoffman published a report announcing his discovery, and so LSD made its entry into the world as a hallucinogenic drug. Widespread use of the so-called “mind-expanding” drug did not begin until the 1960S, when counterculture figures such as Albert M. Hubbard, Timothy Leary, and Ken Kesey publicly expounded on the benefits of using LSD as a recreational drug. The manufacture, sale, possession, and use of LSD, known to cause negative reactions in some of those who take it, were made illegal in the United States in 1965;
1944 – The destroyer USS Laffey survives horrific damage from attacks by 22 Japanese aircraft off Okinawa. You can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8KQaA5hgJ4g ;
1945 – In World War II, Colditz Castle, the high-security prisoner of war camp in Germany, is liberated by American troops;
1947 – Multimillionaire and financier Bernard Baruch, in a speech given during the unveiling of his portrait in the South Carolina House of Representatives, coins the term “Cold War” to describe relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. The phrase stuck, and for over 40 years it was a mainstay in the language of American diplomacy;
1968 – During the Vietnam War, at a series of meetings in Honolulu, President Johnson discusses recent Allied and enemy troop deployments with U.S. military leaders. He also conferred with South Korean President Park Chung Hee to reaffirm U.S. military commitments to Seoul and assure Park that his country’s interests would not be compromised by any Vietnamese peace agreement;
1972 – In the Vietnam War, in an effort to help blunt the ongoing North Vietnamese Nguyen Hue Offensive, the United States resumes bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong after a four-year lull. In the first use of B-52s against both Hanoi and Haiphong, and the first attacks against both cities since November 1968, 18 B-52s and about 100 U.S. Navy and Air Force fighter-bombers struck supply dumps near Haiphong’s harbor. Sixty fighter-bombers hit petroleum storage facilities near Hanoi, with another wave of planes striking later in the afternoon. White House spokesmen announced that the United States would bomb military targets anywhere in Vietnam in order to help the South Vietnamese defend against the communist onslaught. The fighting, which continued into the fall, was some of the most desperate of the war as the South Vietnamese fought for their very survival. They prevailed against the invaders with the help of U.S. advisors and massive American airpower;
1972 – From Cape Canaveral, Florida, Apollo 16, the fifth of six U.S. lunar landing missions, is successfully launched on its 238,000-mile journey to the moon. On April 20, astronauts John W. Young and Charles M. Duke descended to the lunar surface from Apollo 16, which remained in orbit around the moon with a third astronaut, Thomas K. Mattingly, in command. Young and Duke remained on the moon for nearly three days, and spent more than 20 hours exploring the surface of Earth’s only satellite. The two astronauts used the Lunar Rover vehicle to collect more than 200 pounds of rock before returning to Apollo 16 on April 23. Four days later, the three astronauts returned to Earth, safely splashing down in the Pacific Ocean;
1986 – Dispelling rumors he was dead, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi appeared on television to condemn the U.S. raid on his country and to say that Libyans were “ready to die” defending their nation;
2007 – In one of the deadliest shootings in U.S. history, 32 students and teachers die after being gunned down on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University by Seung Hui Cho, a student at the school who later dies from a self-inflicted gunshot wound;
2009 – United Nations nuclear experts are ordered to leave North Korea and departed the country;
2009 – The crew of the cargo ship Maersk Alabama, who’d thwarted pirates off the Somali coast, returned to the United States while the ship’s captain, Richard Phillips, held hostage for five days, arrived in Kenya aboard the USS Bainbridge;
2009 – President Barack Obama issued a statement saying CIA officials who’d used harsh interrogation tactics during the Bush administration would not be prosecuted. On the same day, he traveled to Mexico, where he pledged to help the country in its battle against drugs and violence;
2013 – It was one year ago Today!!!
As we
Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law.
– Romans 13:8
Holy God who owns all things, I thank you for not just owning me, but for having bought me out of slavery, sin, and death. Please kindle love in my heart through the Holy Spirit so I will love others as you do. In Jesus’ name. Amen
I’ll close with a picture to put a smile on your face that requires no caption
Until the next time – America, Bless God!!!
