My grandmother was a nurse in Houston and got called to work it. She told some nightmarish stories about that. She was about 25 at the time.
And it was not the largest non-nuclear explosion. There are a lot of competitors for the title, but it's hard to determine. Here are a few that were probably bigger:
Heligoland/British Bang testOn 18 April 1947 British engineers attempted to destroy the entire North Sea island of Heligoland in what became known as the "British Bang". Roughly 4000 tons of surplus
World War II ammunition were placed in various locations around the island and set off. The island survived, although the extensive fortifications were destroyed. According to Willmore, the energy released was 1.31020 erg (1.31013 J), or about 3.2 kilotons of TNT equivalent. The blast is listed in the
Guinness Book of World Records under
largest single explosive detonation, although
Minor Scale was larger.
Ripple Rock, British Columbia, CanadaOn 5 April 1958 an underwater mountain was levelled by the explosion of 1375 tonnes of
Nitramex2H, an ammonium nitrate-based explosive. This was one of the largest non-nuclear planned explosions on record, and the subject of the first CBC live broadcast coast-to-coast.
Minor Scale and
Misty PictureMany very large detonations have been carried out in order to simulate the effects of nuclear weapons on vehicles and other military material. The largest publicly known test was conducted by the United States
Defense Nuclear Agency (now part of the
Defense Threat Reduction Agency) on 27 June 1985 at the
White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. This test, called Minor Scale, used 4744
short tons of
ANFO, with a yield of about 4 kt. Misty Picture was another similar test a few years later, slightly smaller at 4,685 short tons or 4,250 t.
