< Sister
Stories
 Sister
Alma Murphy
Entered 1928, Died 1996
The morning of April 16, 1947 began
peacefully along Texas’ Gulf Coast. The skies
were blue and the temperature was that of a mild spring
day.
At St. Mary’s Hospital in Galveston a new
east wing was beginning to take shape, although it was
little more than a shell of a building. The late Sr.
Alma Murphy was the hospital administrator and
was walking the halls with the facility’s chief
maintenance supervisor. The time was 9 a.m.
What happened next was something neither Sr. Alma nor
anyone living in Galveston County at that time would
ever forget.
“I can feel it in my imagination,” Sr. Alma
once said in an interview. “It felt as if the ground
was coming up against my feet. We immediately knew there
had been an explosion and our first thoughts were that
it was in the hospital.”
The explosion which Sr. Alma experienced occurred in
Texas City, Texas, just across the bay from Galveston.
Even today it remains as the worst industrial accident
in the United States.
At 9:12 a.m., the ship S.S. Grandcamp exploded at the
docks. The French-owned vessel which was carrying ammonium
nitrate had caught fire early that morning and misguided
attempts to suffocate the fire proved fatal.
Before evening came 200 patients
had been admitted to St. Mary’s Hospital from the explosion. Sisters
from the Beaumont hospital arrived to aid in the care
of those patients.
“People flocked to the hospital,” Sr. Alma
wrote in an account of the disaster. “All of the
beds in the hospital were filled.” The doctors
and nurses worked all day and night.
The next day there was a second explosion
of another ship that had caught fire in the first explosion. There
were now more victims being brought into the over-crowded
hospital. Family and friends of the victims flooded into
the hospital.
The Red Cross set up headquarters
in the Sister’s
Dining room.
People from the community came by to offer help and
supplies out of concern for the injured, but also love
and respect for the Sisters.
Sister Paula Long called the Hotel Galvez for help as
patients were now lined up on the hallway floors.
The hotel responded by sending over 200 beds and mattresses,
plus two sets of linens for each bed. While the beds
were most welcomed, the Sisters faced a dilemma of where
to put them.
Sister Alma directed the beds to
be placed in the new hospital wing which was under
construction. The contractors told Sr. Alma that the
hospital building was not open yet. Considering the
needs of so many injured, she promptly responded, “It is now.” The workers
were told to promptly clean up the area and “get
out.”
According to Sr. Alma’s account, “The contractors
of the new facility were not in favor of our using the
building, but there was no place else we could put them.
There was no electricity, no windows, no running water,
and certainly no air-conditioning. Oscar Hopkins, a long-time
friend of St. Mary’s, who had the lighting contract
for the new building, set up lamps everywhere.”
Although the exact number of people killed was never
known, estimates say that almost 600 people died as a
result of those two explosions. Of that number only 298
were positively identified.
Sr. Alma remembered, “Throughout
that day and night we felt the presence of the Lord with
us. He helped guide us through the great responsibility
of caring for people during this emergency for which we
were totally unprepared. We will be forever grateful for
his help in so many different ways.”
< Sister
Stories
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