19161776 Club
A pier of Allied munitions detonates in New York Harbor overnight
Shrapnel tears into the Statue of Liberty as windows shatter twenty-five miles away, in Times Square.
By the summer of 1916, the Lehigh Valley Railroad's Black Tom Terminal in Jersey City had become a critical artery for American munitions bound for the Allies, guarded by no gate and no lights. Just after 2 a.m. on July 30, roughly two million pounds of ammunition and 100,000 pounds of TNT ignited, an explosion strong enough to register as an earthquake. Jersey City police officer James Doherty, railroad police chief Joseph Leyden, a barge captain, and a ten-week-old infant named Arthur Tosson were among at least seven killed. The Statue of Liberty took a hundred thousand dollars in shrapnel damage, and her torch has not reopened to visitors since…
