Captain Frederick Bouchard

Bouchard Transportation recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The 102-year-old Long Island petroleum barge operator has been struggling over the last several years, involved financial shortfalls and a string of accidents, including a fatal explosion in 2017. 

Rather than focusing on what may be the end of the nation’s largest independently-owned ocean-going petroleum barge company, on this “throwback Thursday” we will take a look back at the company’s origins and to Captain Frederick Bouchard’s heroism during the worst attack on New York harbor prior to 9/11.

At around 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, July 30, 1916, New York harbor exploded. German saboteurs blew up high explosives at the Black Tom terminal in Jersey City. Black Tom was one of the largest munitions terminals in the country, storing and shipping millions of tons of ammunition and high explosives to the French and the British, who were in the second year of what was then called the “Great War” against Germany and its allies.

The blasts lit the night sky and shook the earth with the force of a Richter scale 5.5 earthquake, as an estimated two million pounds of munitions detonated. The explosions sent bullets and shrapnel flying into the air, seriously damaging the nearby Statue of Liberty. Thousands of windows in the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan and in Brooklyn were blown out. Windows as far north as Times Square in midtown were also shattered. In Jersey City, the outer wall of City Hall was cracked and the stained glass windows at St. Patrick’s Church were smashed. The blasts were heard and felt for, at least, 90 miles in every direction, as far as Maryland and Connecticut. In Philadelphia, residents were woken up by the explosions.

Captain Fred Bouchard witnessed the explosions while on watch aboard the tug C. Gallagher of the Goodwin, Gallagher Sand Co., at the Long Dock at Erie Basin in Brooklyn. Rather than hunkering down, he steered the tug into the fiery maelstrom and helped to rescue the 4,000-ton steamer Tijoca Rio, and the schooner George E. Elezy of Bath, ME.

In May 1917, the U.S. District Court issued Captain Fred a salvage award, as well as an award for personal bravery, for a total of $9,000. He promptly invested this money to create his own company – Bouchard Transportation Company. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Sadly, that legacy may be coming to an end. Only time and the tides will tell.