April 18, 2013

What We Know About the Huge Explosion at the West, Texas, Fertilizer Plant

Over a hundred are injured and many feared dead in the small central Texas town.

    —By the MoJo news team

Shortly before 8 p.m. CDT on Wednesday, a massive explosion rocked the central Texas town of West following a fire at a fertilizer plant. Early reports are conflicting, but it appears that over a hundred of people have been injured, and dozens of homes and businesses have been damaged or destroyed, including a high school and a nursing home.

Authorities are concerned that winds could carry the toxic fumes into residential areas. At a press conference on Wednesday night, Mayor Tommy Muska (who is also a volunteer firefighter) said, “A lot of people won’t be here tomorrow…it’s a cut across our hearts.” Complicating matters is the location: A volunteer fire department serves the town of 2,700, and casualties are being transported to the nearest hospital in Waco—20 miles away.

Plant location:

The fire escalated so fast because of its fuel:

The clearest footage we have of the blast itself comes from a man who appears to have been watching the fire from his car with his young daughter. The explosion comes about 30 seconds in (warning: not for the faint of heart):

The Dallas Morning-News captured the audio of the emergency dispatcher responding to the fire. At the 7:41 mark, the dispatcher advises that all units “need to load up and get out of there right now”:

While the explosion registered on a seismograph over 400 miles away in Amarillo, Texas:

Wednesday’s fire came one day after the 66th anniversary of the worst industrial accident in American history—the Texas City disaster, another fertilizer explosion that left 581 people dead when a French vessel hauling ammonium nitrate caught fire.

In February, a nearby school was evacuated due to a “concerning fire” from a fertilizer plant in the area:

 

Community Memo WIS Temporary Evacuation (Text)

By midnight on Thursday, more than 100 people had offered their homes to people displaced by the West, Texas explosion using a shared Google Doc. Over on Reddit, people are attempting to assemble a crowdsourced map of the blast site and emergency services that you can see here.

For on-the-ground coverage, check out the local station NBCDFW’s livestream. On Twitter, follow the Waco Tribune (@wacotrib) and @DallasNews, as well as local reporters Lowell Brown (@LowellMBrown), Stewart McKenzie (@CBS11ProdStew), and Mireya Villarreal (@cbsmireya).

UPDATE 1, Thursday, April 18, 1:03 p.m. EDT: Video of the devastation:

UPDATE 2, Thursday, April 18, 1:05 p.m. EDT: Texas Governor Rick Perry held a press conference Thursday on the explosion. Perry reiterated that the search for survivors continues.

UPDATE 3, Thursday, April 18, 2:34 p.m. EDT: Estimates have put the number of dead and missing at 15, but those figures are expected to rise. According to a 2011 safety plan filed with the EPA, the plant did not have firewalls or an automatic shutdown system, reported the Wall Street Journal.

UPDATE 4, Thursday, April 18, 3:11 p.m. EDT:

“We haven’t had a complaint from that facility since 2006,” Zak Covar, director of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, told the Texas Tribune. Covar added that the facility had been “grandfathered” from some environmental regulations until 2004.

UPDATE 5, Thursday, April 18, 3:56 p.m. EDT:

The Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco will be spearheading the inquiry into what caused the explosion, the Waco Tribune reports. Officials told the paper the investigation could take up to six months.

UPDATE 6, Thursday, April 18, 8:30 p.m. EDT:

As many feared and expected, the number of those killed by the blast has risen. Tommy Muska, the mayor of West Texas, confirmed to USA Today and the LA Times that as many as 35 are dead, including 10 first responders. Waco Tribune reporter Lowell M. Brown captured the impact of this felt by one resident, who, after listing the names of volunteer firefighters still missing, told the paper the town would never be the same again. Meanwhile, survivors of the blast are taking comfort in the famed kolaches and coffee at Czech Stop—a nearby, 24-hour institution that kept its doors open through the tragedy.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate