My daddy was a refinery worker for Union Oil Refinery in Nederland, Texas for all the years I was living at home and then some. Refinery workers go into a dangerous workplace every day and yet they go in and come out of their unit like any white-collar worker in downtown Houston at the end of their shift. Daddy was also on the company's fire safety crew and at times had to extinguish flames that might occur in the refinery. Fortunately, he was never involved in as horrible an explosion as this Baytown area heard about recently.
Texas City is located about 45 minutes down the Gulf Coast of Texas from here. Many locals work at the BP refinery there where, Wednesday, March 23, 2005, a terrible explosion blasted through the plant killing 15 people and injuring more than 100 others. I teach school here in Baytown and I didn't even know about the accident until I was driving home and heard it on the radio. The next morning at school I learned that our young P. E. coach had to go to Texas City to identify his wife's father. His father-in-law was working on a job in the BP refinery and it was soon to be completed. What a heartbreaking act of love for a young man to commit as to identify the lifeless body of his wife's dad.
My heart goes out to all of the families that lost loved ones in that explosion. Many of the newspaper articles I read this morning at breakfast was remembering another Texas City explosion that killed more than 500 people back in 1947. That explosion came right on the heels of WWII and many veterans compared the aftermath of the explosion to war.
I couldn't help but think about all of those years of watching my dad come home from work carrying his black lunchpail and wearing his hardhat that I oftentimes played with. I have fond happy memories of his returning home and getting a kiss and a hug from my daddy.
For most of those years I never once thought of my daddy as being in danger when he went to work. Then, sometimes at home my mother and I would hear the refinery whistles go off. That was when my mom would stop and announce with concern, "Those are the fire whistles at the refinery." Next I'd observe my mother look to the sky for smoke or listen to the news and especially wait for a phone call from my daddy telling her he was alright. That is not to say that my mother lived in fear each day that my dad went off to work. Quite the contrary, she never really gave it a thought until we would hear those refinery whistles. Then reality of pending danger would come to the forefront of our thoughts. Of course, now that I think about it, she must have gone through much the same or worse situations when my dad was overseas during WWII.
As I think back on those days growing up in a town where most of my friend's fathers were refinery workers too, I think about the children and families that lost loved ones Wednesday in that blast in Texas City. I'm sure they were not expecting that day to be any different from the rest. I can just visualize the panic and anguish on the faces of wives or husbands as they began to hear sirens. It makes me very sad for them because I can just imagine how my mom, my brothers and I would have reacted if it had happened to us back then. Thankfully, God spared us from such a tragedy.
May God bless and support those families that are suffering today because of their losses in the Texas City Explosion of 2005.
ML
2 comments:
I think that growing up in a city like Baytown, or Port Neches, we take the dargers of these jobs for granted. This significance is not lost on Amanda who never saw the smoke stacks and oil refinery structures like the ones we have here until she visited Baytown with me for the first time. Others who would visit me were awstruck and even a little frightened at the thought of gases and oil and other chemicals being dealt with in such close proximity to where we were living. To me it's just the scenery. When I was a kid I even thought that it was Baytown's downtown, because of the way it resembled Houston's skyline.
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