Explosions

“In an instant [on July 4, 1921], the day of fun became the most deadly and gruesome day in the Standard Oil refinery’s history.” John Hmurovic

Thirteen American servicemen, including Marine sergeant Nicole Gee, died as a result of an ISIS terrorist attack near an entrance to the Kabul airport. The explosion also killed over a hundred Afghans attempting to flee Taliban rule. President Joe Biden and other dignitaries honored the brave victims as their coffins arrived back in America. Most Republicans are feigning outrage at the “debacle” while remaining mostly silent on Trump’s policies that led directly to pulling the plug on a 20-year doomed effort.

On the front page of the NWI Times was a lengthy article by Joseph S. Pete about a 1921 explosion at a Whiting, Indiana, oil refinery that killed eight people and injured 44. Using the writings and an interview with historian and Whiting-Robertsdale Historical Society mainstay John Hmurovic, who for many years has volunteered his time at IUN’s Calumet Regional Archives, the article noted that a 1955 refinery explosion is more famous and caused more property damage, wiping out the entire Stiglitz Park neighborhood, but the hundred-year-old blast took more lives. Shortly after 8:15 in the morning, as the midnight shift ended and the day shift reported for duty, an overheated battery exploded and set off a chain reaction that turned the lakefront plant into an inferno. Most of the incinerated victims were immigrants from Slovakia, Sweden, Germany, and England. One victim was firefighter Joseph Paylo, a World War I veteran, who helped get survivors to safety but inhaled so much super-heated fumes that it burned his lungs. Hnurovic noted: It was a sad scene. The refinery didn’t allow people inside. There was no social media, no telephones, no way of communication. Bodies were being carried out, and no one knew who it was or what was going on. Women were begging workers to tell them if they saw their husbands because they didn’t know if they were still alive. They could only identify the dead from watches, jewelry or clothing. The bodies were unrecognizable. A Fourth of July parade had been scheduled to begin about 45 minutes after the blast occurred. After a delay of several hours, it went ahead, followed, incredibly, by a fireworks celebration. Hmurovic offered this explanation, “Back then, people experienced hardship in a different way. People were used to having to deal with hard conditions and just rolled with the punches.” The final indignity to those foreign-born workers who had hoped, as Hmurovic put it, “to make a new life for themselves,” was that even though the tragedy was determined to have been caused by a leak, pro-business inspectors ruled that it was “an act of God” rather than the result of company negligence, a ruling, Joseph Pete wrote, that “minimized Standard Oil’s legal liability.”

Several spectacular explosions occurred at the Aetna Powder Company, built in the early 1880s in a then remote location that later became part of Gary. The nitroglycerine was first used primarily to remove famers’ tree stumps and shortly before its closure provided explosives for use in World War I. An 1888 blast killed three workers and could be heard 120 miles away in Fort Wayne. Another in 1912 killed eight people; two years later an explosion rattled windows in downtown Gary. John Hmurovic’s four-hour documentary on the “City of the Century,” based in part on my book, mentioned this miniature company town. By 1921, with the rapid expansion of the city’s population the dangerous facility’s days were numbered.