generalspeaking

Search-and-Rescue

"We were just about to get it started when the dadgum thing blew."
"It shook the building so bad -- knocked a lot of the guys out of their chairs. All the ceiling panels and so forth came down, and the light fixtures fell out and the insulation fell out all over everything, and it was not a pleasant sight. The noise was excruciating."
"They were firemen. Two young lives that didn't need to go, but they're gone."
West resident Raymond Snokhous

Mr. Snokhous described how unprepared and shocked he and his friends were, at a Wednesday evening get-together at the Knights of Columbus Hall, located near the West Fertilizer plant, 24 hours after a massive explosion ignited anhydrous ammonia, held at the plant, the result of a fire. He spoke of two second cousins, killed in the resulting explosion, first-responders, firefighters who had come out to try to extinguish the fire, and caught in the explosion instead.

Fifty homes destroyed, a 50-unit apartment building demolished, the local intermediate school damaged, three fire trucks and an ambulance wrecked. An entire section of West, a small town of roughly 2,800 residents have had their lives forever altered.  Firefighters from surrounding towns came to the defence of the town, carefully going through the rubble and the wreckage, looking for other casualties of the massive explosion.

Of the town's own first-responders, about eight of the fourteen dead are now held to have been local firefighters. They had arrived to cope with an emergency, a fire at the fertilizer factory which the operators had assured local authorities and the Environmental Protection Agency presented no danger to the community. Arriving at the scene of the fire, prepared to battle the fire, the chemicals combusted and destroyed a large area of the town. And took the lives of those firefighters.

The factory was void of safety measures, despite that it had been previously cited for unsafe storage of ammonia tanks, improperly labelled. There were no blast walls, firewalls , sprinklers or any other safety measures that could be relied upon to kick in when such an emergency situation arose. Plant officials were complacent that despite the reputation for such chemicals to combust under the right conditions, that their operation was safe.

Or they simply felt it was not incumbent upon them to be responsible and take the trouble, spend the money to protect both their investment and the lives and properties of those surrounding the factory, since the state and local officials didn't seem all that interested in investigating safety mechanisms at the plant, and holding them accountable for effecting necessary changes.

Security personnel gradually and carefully sifted through the wreckage surrounding the plant to determine whether there were any additional casualties apart from the 14 dead and the 200 townspeople injured. "There are homes that are no longer homes", a spokesman for the Waco Police Department, touring the streets close to the plant, observed after the blast.

No one yet knows what caused the fire. Local, state and federal officials will be conducting their own enquiries. "The experts don't know what happened and I am going to leave it to the experts", Jerry Sinkale, foreman at the plant said, refusing to comment on the explosion or the possible causes of the catastrophe.

Labels: Catastrophe, United States

posted by Pieface @ Monday, April 22, 2013