Road crews can use something called an asphalt cold patch. This is typical to fill in potholes that threaten to swallow semis or schoolbuses filled with small children during the winter months.
It’s a crummy patch. The edges will chip away, the patch will crack, and it will eventually crumble. But it’s cheap, and can be done year round.
With budget cuts and zero municipal funding, sometimes cold patches are done over and over, and entire stretches are a patchwork quilt of cold patches. When the money can be scraped together, roads are blocked off, the big machinery is hauled out, and a big stinkin’ cauldron of hot tar fills the surrounding area with fumes, and the job is done right.
~VOW
My dad actually was a toddler in Galveston at the time, and at some point moved to the town adjacent to Texas City when he was a boy (La Marque).
He said that it wasn’t uncommon for people his age or a couple years younger to have small facial scars from blown-in window glass hitting them in the face when they were sleeping as babies. ISTR reading somewhere that the explosion of the SS Grandcamp was roughly equivalent to a one-kiloton nuclear weapon in terms of blast.
There’s actually a whole section of the county cemetery that my grandmother explained was built specifically for victims of the disaster, since there weren’t enough spaces available in the existing sections.
Oh, and one more thing- a good friend of mine grew up in Camden (the town where the truck blew up near Beckdawreck), and based on what he’s told me, every weird story she tells is probably true. It seems to be an unusual area around there, that’s for sure.
I watched the local news coverage of this explosion.
I went to technical school for 2 years in E Camden. That whole area was a military proving ground. We used to party in some of the old concrete bunkers.
The Tech. College is still there. Also the LE training academy, a Fire training academy. Lots of government contractors. E. Camden is a fast growing area. Unfortunately Camden proper is declining. During the Civil war Camden was the 2nd largest city in Arkansas.
