Area around the explosion at a West, Texas fertilizer plant. Over 100 homes and businesses were damaged in the blast. Initial reports indicate there are at least 200 casualties., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.
As many as 15 dead, 160 wounded in Texas fertilizer plant blast
By Michael Muskal
5:36 AM PDT, April 18, 2013
An explosion shattered a fertilizer plant in a rural Texas town, flattened blocks of homes and businesses and left as many as 15 people dead and more than 160 injured, officials said Thursday morning.
Hours after the explosion tore through the heart of West, Texas, a town of about 2,800 people in the north-central portion of the state, hundreds of firefighters and first responders were still battling the remnants of the blaze at the West Fertilizer Co.
“They are still getting injured folks out, and they are evacuating people from their homes,” Waco police Sgt. William Patrick Swanton said early Thursday morning.
“At some point this will turn into a recovery operation, but at this point, we are still in search and rescue,” he said.
Even as evacuations and triage continued, officials estimated the number of injured at more than 160, some of whom were in serious condition. Many were evacuated to hospitals as far away as Dallas.
West Mayor Tommy Muska told reporters that his city needs the prayers of everyone.
“We've got a lot of people who are hurt, and there's a lot of people, I'm sure, who aren't gonna be here tomorrow,” Muska said.
“We're gonna search for everybody. We're gonna make sure everybody's accounted for. That's the most important thing right now.”
The Wednesday night blast shook houses 50 miles away and measured as a magnitude 2.1 seismic event, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
“It was like a nuclear bomb went off,” Muska said. “Big old mushroom cloud.”
The death toll was between five and 15 people, according to authorities, who stressed that was still a fluid count. As many as five volunteer firefighters were unaccounted for, they said.
There is no indication that the blast was anything other than an industrial accident, but the area was being treated as a crime scene, a routine precaution, officials said.
The explosion stunned the region, eerily coming almost exactly 20 years after the massacre in Waco, about 20 miles away.
Seventy-six members of the Branch Davidians died in 1993 after a 50-day siege of their compound. April 19 is also the anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, where 168 people were killed in 1995.
A fire was reported at about 6 p.m. local time at the factory, and volunteer firefighters immediately responded. However, they faced a difficult job because of the danger from chemicals, including ammonia, used in the production of fertilizer.
By 8 p.m. the plant exploded, turning a radius of four city blocks into a flattened zone, according to City Councilman Al Vanek. He told reporters that that area was “totally decimated.”
The property damage was fierce, including at least 50 houses. An apartment complex with about 50 units was stripped to its skeletal support, according to video from the scene. A middle school was also hard hit.
The West Rest Haven Nursing Home was in the danger zone, and firefighters said they had evacuated more than 130 patients, many in wheelchairs.
The explosion was heard dozens of miles away and witnesses, interviewed by local television, repeatedly compared it to an earthquake.
Mayor Muska was among the firefighters and said the explosion knocked off his fire helmet and blew out the doors and windows of his nearby home.
The main fire was under control as of 11 p.m., authorities said. By dawn Thursday there was lingering smoke and the stench of chemicals still in the air.
About 100 of the injured were treated at Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center in Waco, where five people were in intensive care, officials said. Others were taken to Providence Health Center in Waco.
Officials said the injuries included broken bones, bruises, lacerations, respiratory distress and some head injuries and minor burns.
There were no immediate details available from police on the number of people who work at the plant, which was cited by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality in 2006 for failing to obtain or to qualify for a permit. The agency acted after receiving a complaint in June of that year of a strong ammonia smell, according to the Associated Press.
'The whole street is gone': Bloodied eyewitnesses describe Texas explosion horror
A survivor of the West, Texas plant explosion describes the blast and what he saw and experienced as he escaped the area
By Alastair Jamieson and Matthew DeLuca NBC News
Shocked and bloodied eyewitnesses in the small Texas town of West described the overwhelming power of a Texas fertilizer plant explosion that killed between 5 and 15 people, injured scores more and caused extensive damage to dozens of local homes, a nursing home, and a middle school.
“The school’s gone, the apartments are gone,” resident Sammy Chavez, wearing a blood-soaked t-shirt, told reporters. He was sitting in his truck watching the fire when the sudden, ear-shattering blast sent shards of glass spinning through the air. “It’s just horrible.”
Other residents of the town of 2,700 ran from their homes after the blast filled the sky with a massive fireball around 8 p.m. local time on Wednesday.
Crystal Jerigan rushed outside her home about 15 blocks from the blazing West Fertilizer Company plant after hearing the sirens of emergency responders. She was in the driveway with her two daughters preparing to flee when the plant exploded.
“About the time that I got to the car, you could hear the boom and within seconds, it just sucked you in and just threw you to the ground,” Jerigan told TODAY.
Crystal Ledane shares the dramatic story and her concern for neighbors after her home was damaged by fertilizer plant explosion.
Another local resident, Derrick Hurtt, who was sitting in his truck with his daughter Khloey taping the burning plant, caught the moment of the blast on camera. He estimated he was at least 300 yards from the plant, but that was still too close.
In his video, Hurtt can be heard asking his daughter if she is OK.
“Please get out of here, please get out of here, dad please get out of here,” the young girl can be heard saying. “I can’t hear anything.”
“I’m pretty sure it lifted the truck off the ground,” Hurtt said on TODAY. “It just blew me over on top of her. It all happened so quick that things just kind of went black for a moment.”
Another bloodied, shaken resident, identified as local EMS doctor George Smith, told reporters: “There was just a major, major explosion. The windows came in on me, the roof came in on me, the ceiling came in. We lost all communication when the power went out.”
“The whole street is gone,” he added.
Even standing several blocks from the plant, residents said they were knocked back by the terrific shock that radiated from the plant explosion.
“A nearby nursing home is really bad, there’s an apartment complex and the school that caught fire,” Crystal Anthony, who serves on the town’s school board of trustees, told the Waco Tribune-Herald. “We’ve been moving patients out of the nursing home and taking them to the football field and gymnastics building on Davis Street.”
Other residents speculated about the cause of the explosion that wiped out homes and killed friends in the town about 20 miles north of Waco.
“It was a small fire and then water got sprayed on the ammonium nitrate, and it exploded just like the Oklahoma City bomb,” local hotel clerk Jason Shelton told the Dallas Morning News. “I live about a thousand feet from it and it blew my screen door off and my back windows. There’s houses leveled that were right next to it.”
“That whole side of town looks like a disaster,” Bill Manolakis told the paper. “Who in their right mind sticks a damn plant next to houses?”
Bill Bohannan was visiting his parents in one of the houses near the plant, and witnessed the devastating explosion.
“I said, ‘This thing is going to blow,’” as he hurried his parents into the car, Bohannan told the Waco Tribune-Herald. “I was standing next to my car with my fiancée, waiting for my parents to come out and [the plant] exploded. It knocked us into the car.”
“Every house within about four blocks is blown apart,” Bohannan said.
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