1916 Black Tom blast anniversary observed

NEW YORK - The sound of the blast was unearthly, and the tremor was felt 100 miles away in Philadelphia. The night sky over New York Harbor turned orange. People were jolted from bed and windows shattered within 25 miles.

The Statue of Liberty, less than a mile away, was damaged by a rain of red-hot shards of steel. Frightened immigrants on Ellis Island were hastily evacuated to Manhattan.

The epicenter of the blast — a small island called Black Tom — all but disappeared in what was then the largest explosion ever in the U.S., on Sunday, July 30, 1916 at 2:08 a.m.

It destroyed about 2,000 tons of munitions parked in freight cars and pierside barges, awaiting transfer to ships and ultimately destined for the World War I battlefields of France.

Evidence pointed to German sabotage, and some historians regard it as the first major terrorist attack on the United States by a foreign party — 85 years before the 9/11 attacks.

Marked today by a plaque in New Jersey's Liberty State Park, the blast site lies less than two miles from lower Manhattan and within sight of where the World Trade Center towers stood.