Explosion Levels a Neighbourhood (Disaster Documentary)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 พ.ย. 2023
- The in-depth story of the City of West (Texas) Explosion 2013. A routine fire call to a local fertilizer plant tragically ends up being the crew's last mission. The first responders had no clue that their equipment would prove futile against the explosive force about to tear through the small community of West, Texas. As investigators sift through the rubble, disturbing revelations about the plant emerge, raising troubling concerns of the silent threat facing countless other towns.
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The fact that no regulations have changed says volumes. The people in charge are practically asking for this to happen again.
What do you expect? Money talks, and it would cost too much money to fix things. Plus you know what the rednecks in Texas are like with governments 'interfering'.
@@shogun2215, you beat me to it.
@@shogun2215 considering things nowadays i wouldnt be surprised if stuff like this starts to happen more cause everythings so costly now
@saiyanscaris6530 all the chickens being killed off by the bird flu and food production plants catching fire makes me scratch my head. Prices keep rising and the CEOs don't receive a pay cut.
@@shogun2215government doesn't do shit for us anyways. Look at east Palestine ohio. The queer director of transportation couldn't be bothered to come off "maternity" leave to address that situation. Toxic chemicals in the ground water and air due to a "controlled burn". I think the government/biden administration gave the residents $400 after kicking them out of their homes while illegal immigrants and Ukrainian citizens received more than double that. It's a republican area so fuck em I guess.. Joe biden said he'd be a president for ALL Americans yet he does more for everyone besides us. I'm sure he has a Ukrainian nurse follow him around to wipe drool off his mouth and change his diaper every couple hours. Her salary is probably 30 million dollars.
You should cover the 1999 Mexia Supermarket incident. Basically, a supermarket went bankrupt and the owners decided to close shop without taking out all the food. This negligence caused an extremely biohazardous environment to be created that lasted months.
That sounds insane! I would love a deep dive on that
Literal tons of rotten food and fouled drinks…guh the smell from that alone could probably kill let alone all the nasties developing in the food
@@warlynx5644 Yeah, the oxygen levels dropped considerably because of the rotting meat, produce, ect. It's a fascinating story.
That happened to a local supermarket in my city a few months ago. The municipality ended up have to hire a cleaning company specialized in cleaning crime scenes for it...
This incident was covered in an episode of “Life After People”!
This is why communities need the kind of zoning laws that say you can't build houses, schools, and nursing homes next to industrial plants, instead of the kind of zoning laws that say you can't build apartments in residential areas.
Builders would have a fit. In capitalistic America, builders pretty much write the local zoning laws, to benefit their greedy industries.
The thing I "love" about these videos is the changes that get made to ensure the disaster doesn't happen again. It's always horrible, but those lives lost go towards no one else dying in that way.
This is very upsetting. Those people died for nothing.
All companies work the same way the Chinese do. Humans are expendable trinkets and are just a means to some number figures on a spreadsheet.
why the hell would you bring race into this????@@MrWolfSnack
lol race, get out of here, clown. @@MmntoMorrisson
@@MmntoMorrissonit's not a racist thing, what are you going to call people who live in China? In china they often treat their workers very poorly, often highering uneducated and poor people from small villages to cut costs. They even have a name for such projects, "tofu dreg projects" or "tofu dreg construction". Often people are killed or die when these projects are being built or when they fail because safety laws are ignored and corners are cut. Before you leap for the outrage maybe learn a little something next time.
I think because Chinese companies are known for absolutely inhumane working conditions. It got so bad at Foxconn, the company installed suicide prevention nets below all the upper floor windows.
Nearly this exact same thing happened about 2 years ago in my hometown in NC. Fertilizer plant caught fire, immediately everyone was on high alert because of this tragedy and others like it. They basically evacuated half of downtown and proceeded with extreme caution over the course of multiple days to kill the fire before an ammonium nitrate explosion could take place (they had LOADS of it on the grounds). It was really scary for the whole city- I’m an adult and live out of town now, but I was calling and texting my parents making sure they stayed far away. The air was also unsafe to breathe because of all the chemicals from the plant for miles around, which made things worse. Luckily we avoided a similar disaster.
what city was this!? I live in NC and never heard of it!
Winston Salem! The Weaver Co. Fertilizer Plant was the site, they had around 600 tons of ammonium nitrate
@@cookingmama_I wonder if it was safely stored in different locations and that's why there wasn't an explosion, it's really foolish to store a potential explosive all in one area, like the explosion in Beirut, they had stored 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate near a bunch of fireworks they had been stored in close proximity for a number of years before the fireworks caught fire causing the explosion.
@@cookingmama_ Wow! I live in Greensboro and never heard of it! Glad you are safe neighbor!
ah yes, shit that the USCSB should have been able to prevent
After the disaster, the Texas State Fire Marshal's Office inspected every ammonium nitrate facility in the state, documenting safety hazards at almost every location. Due to the lack of a statewide fire code in small towns and rural areas, no enforcement actions were taken, other than strongly worded warning letters mailed to the owners and copied to the local fire department.
and none of those towns will pass stronger codes because the owners of the mill will just move it somewhere else. The corporates sadly always hold the cards, regulations on these places need to be on a wide scale, possibly even at the federal level. with an addition that imported of the same chemical must be produced under similar safety standards so the companies cant just ditch off to some country with no laws.
One way to force action is that any site that is deemed unsafe is a no-go zone for the rescue services.
Let's see what the insurance companies do about that.
@@57thorns Still brings the case of these plans moving to more lax locations, and given this brings in money and money is politics, the chances are unlikely unless something is implemented at least on a state level of not more.
Yup! That's Texas the trump loving state. Nuff said!!!
@@BrentCarrington-fk7yy Is that why you started the fires?
I live in Waco and still remember this night very well and seeing the entire city lit up in emergency lights on the local news. The level of support from everyone in this area was incredible both at the time and the aftermath
Vote smarter
The fuck does that have to with anything@@Jude74
@Jude74 Happened before I was allowed to vote
@@Jude74What did politics have to do with any of this ?
Rude Jude
I live near there. Helped with search and rescue after. The fertilizer plant was well outside the city for a long time. The city government allowed residents and schools to be built closer and closer to the plant.
Wow. Thank you for helping and I pray you and others have healed from the trauma. Hopefully they did not rebuild so close
@cynthiaholland13 they did not rebuild the fertilizer plant. They did however build a memorial to the firefighters that died and a new city park near where the plant used to be. It's a very nice park that I've taken my kids to a few times.
Thank you for your actions
It’s horrible how they could literally go 28 years without even seeing the inside of the place that alone scares me more than anything I live near one of the biggest nuclear plants in ga I know for sure even tho I’m not very close I’d definitely be affected
Maybe they get too much funding.
@@andywomack3414 Who is "they"?
@@andywomack3414 It's likely that they don't get *enough* funding.
At least nuclear plants are not primed to explode the same way as fertilizer plants. There is a lot more that has to go wrong before anything really bad happens (Chernobyl was a series of stupidity that boggles the mind, Fukushima was extreme circumstances that are not quite applicable unless you live on the San Andreas fault line, Three Mile Island was contained and never exploded or leaked any significant amounts of radiation)
I wouldnt ever live near a nuclear plant
the video by the dad with the daughter in his car is insane. its a bad idea to be watching these kinds of industrial fires unless you're perhaps a scientist/engineer and understand the risks of that particular plant. even then how can you be sure, the beirut blast was from a warehouse.
Thought maybe it was a son instead of a daughter, but regardless that was my big takeway, too. So many tragedies have lives lost in ways that they themselves could not prevent, but this dipshit wanted to make himself and his child a statistic. Vaporized in the blast or shredded by broken glass or deafened from popped ear drums. What a damned fool, to traumatize a child like that, for WHAT!?
hearing her say, “i can’t hear!” and then begging to leave absolutely breaks my heart
He's an american, he's a tough guy.
Watching this video reminds me of when this happened. It also reminds me of the Harbour explosion in Beirut.
or the Texas City explosion in 1947. A ship full of Ammonium Nitrate was on fire. When it exploded it leveled the entire city.
I thought of Beirut almost immediately.
Same as a Canadian with the Halifax explosion, incredibly sad.
Seen some of the debris and memorials while I was in Nova Scotia last year, history there is wild
I think both accidents had certain chemicals in common, it being the ammonium nitrate and possibly something else, but maybe it was just that
@@zerinhofiver agreed
I remember when this happened! I lived in a town about 15 miles away and was at work at the time. The explosion was so big that the entire building i was in shook and tons of product fell off the shelves (i worked for Dollar General at the time) the customers were terrified and even we were super freaked out since it sounded like someone had let off a massive bomb. We had no idea what happened. Just heard a massive booming sound and everything shook. I had friends who lived in West whose homes were messed up, losing all their windows. Some who were home at the time ended up in the ER with multiple lacerations from flying glass. It was terrifying and should never have happened 🫠
5:12 man how about that little girl - had to be terrifying, then temporary deafness, and FIRST impulse is to get her dad to safety ❤
It infuriated me that the guy brought his kid into that situation.
"The ATF said they were never notified of the fertilizer at the facility. The rules say any facility must notify the ATF of anything more that one ton of fertilizer on the premises"
Here is a hint. It's a fertilizer plant. Next time maybe the ATF should look into fertilizer plants as possible locations of fertilizer.
It isn't enforceable. Any given day I have an average of 20T. Sometimes a little more, or a little less. Not once have I notified any "agency" of my property. I also store everything correctly... and segmented.
@@I_Dont_Answer_Questions My point is it's typical government bureaucrat BS excuses. "It's not our fault. We never inspected the plant because nobody notified us there was fertilizer at the fertilizer plant".
That would make too much sense. Someone may have to be held accountable if that happened
They're more worried about taking people's arms away, than they are about breaches in safety codes caused by production facilities.
@@takedown205productions6 Nobody is taking anybodies guns. What are you doing to stop mass shootings? I bet you don't realize that is is strictly a USA issue.
So basically a case of: "we do not care" from all parties involved
1947 Texas City disaster. Ammonium nitrate explosion on a docked ship. Considered the worst disaster in U.S. history. “City on Fire,” by Bill Minutaglio recounts the event in stark detail (and is one of the finest books in existence).
I hope the survivors are doing better now.
I’m a couple miles out from Waco and I remember hearing about this incident, I was only 13 at the time this happened
Nice video man well done
Had just used a nitrate spreader from there a few weeks before. I was like 15-20 miles away, thought it was thunder.
My late grandfather was the HazMat and Safety Coordinator for TxDoT. He spent his last week before his retirement dealing with the aftermath of this.
For anyone interested, the United States Chemical Safety Board made a video about this explosion. It's suuuuper high quality, and the narrator's voice is like specialty butter. They also issued an official report and recommendations to reduce the chance of another incident along the same vein.
I am stunned that there were no sprinkles. Where I work we have sprinkles even where there is nothing flammable.
Not everybody works in a doughnut shop.
Green sprinkles are the yummiest.
I hate when my ammonium nitrate catches alight and the only thing that comes out of the overhead nozzles is rainbow sprinkles.
Couldn't even spring for chocolate. Cheap-ass owner.
Where I'm from, we call sprinkles jimmies. And we put sprinklers in our buildings.
The ammonium nitrate inside the railway cars didnt explode, proving rather convincingly that the ammonium nitrate isnt that dangerous unless you store it in an astonishingly shitty conditions.
The same thing happen at the Pepcon plant that stored rocket fuel. A torch that was being used there set off a small fire that exploded all the fuel.
I remember hearing about this, after i had woken up to check radar and came across this story in the news. Absolutely terrifying and sad.
The problem with self-regulation and self-inspection...
the problem with american stupidity and greed "muh freedom, muh rights"
One of the main reason why libertarianism is almost as r tarded as communism. And we have already tried both. What libertarians want was pretty much tried out during the industrial revolution and lead to more and more regulartions, workers unions etc. to protect the people in general, costumer and workers from scrupulous factories, corps etc. and well, we've tried communism pretty extensively as well. With both we have the endresult of unbridled exploitation of the people with the rich powerful elite acting at will. At least libertarian-style early capitalism was still somewhat existing alongside democrating voting system but yeah, we all know that there are no real elections happening in communism anymore. Unfortantely with its system of lobbyism (aka legal bribery) the USA still has a lot of the negative aspects of liberterianism going on which leads to the people, customers and workers being harmed again and again.
Heard a lot about ammonium nitrate in the days after Oklahoma City.
Remember, all safety laws are written in blood
Tejus never writes them down...
yup and in this case there were not following existing ones
I remember about a month after the explosion having to stop in West to get gas. I'd visited the city several times over the course of 15 years before the incident, but afterwards, the general feel of the place was so vastly different.
I have watched so much of your videos, they are amazing! I highly appreciate you making these, to teach us and it’s almost like a tribute to the people who have died in these disasters. I pray for everyone and all their families. We are all very lucky to have proper safety regulations for everything, but sadly we never think of the reasons we got them in the first place. God Bless all those people and hero’s. 😔🙏🏼
I know this one will be good! ❤️
Love the videos! ❤️🇨🇦❤️
OSHA: Oh Shit, it Happened Again
omg that kid saying get out of here dad i cnat hear broke my heart
I had a cousin that lived in the apartments near the plant. She was airlifted to a trauma center in Temple, Texas was in hospital for a few weeks. Many surrounding fire depts, paid and volunteers, hurried to West to help including a truck from my little town of Chilton in Falls County. This definitely affected a large portion of Central Texas and knowing there hasn't been regulation changes is frustrating and heartbreaking.
I have to point out that nobody was forced into moving close to a fertilizer storage facility that had for years been located "in the middle of nowhere" and far away from residences and other structures since 1962. The responsibility for the explosion lies primarily with the fertizer plant, but the responsibility for personal property damage of nearby homes, schools, etc., also rests on the people who built those structures so close to a known risk.
My thoughts exactly. I watched a better, longer version of this. This plant was away from everybody when built, but over the years people got stupid and started building things closer and closer to it.
It's really really sad that this will inevitably happen again when we could prevent it
From what I understand about ammonium nitrate is that if it's going to be stored in bulk, temperature is paramount to be monitored. If it starts getting hot by itself, it's beginning its decay cycle and becomes more volatile the hotter it gets. Putting water on it accelerates the decay so at that point it's more dangerous to use water than not.
Mitigation of thermal decay is to spread it out to increase the surface area to mass. So the heat can be more readily dissipated slowing if not fully halting the decay reaction. Moisture being absorbed by the ammonium nitrate begins the process of the thermal decay process.
It's why fields where it is spread actually get warmer especially after a rain. It's simple to say, but in practice is highly difficult, but to store it in humidity regulated spaces in small quantities of not more than 1000kg spaced at minimum of 50' from the next storage lot. To do so requires a lot of area which is great if you're far from a town center. Not so much if the town grows up around you because of cheap land prices. It's tragic that this happened and more so that there were government failures to catch it before becoming what it did. The causes are multi fold: Laziness, cost cutting, demand, on and on. Unfortunately there is not a easy solution, less a singular entity that blames rests on.
I'm not defending the parent company holder. They have blame enough for not taking extra measures to reduce the risk that resulted in this. They became the target because it was far easier to show their negligence than the other agencies that dropped the ball they had.
0:20 The second he said ‘fertilizer plant’ I knew it was bad. Those are some of those most dangerous fires. My parents were fire fighters and I’m SO glad we didn’t have any fertilizer plants in our township and very few surrounding us. They’re so scary
Your videos are amazing!
I live in Las Vegas! I remember hearing about this.
It reminded me of the Pepcon explosion we had in Henderson NV. I'll never forget, I thought a plane went down!
It's scary! This was a lot worse than what we experienced.
First responders are so critical to any disaster. Yet they run the risk of being so close to the disaster.
This was a horrible tragedy.
I saw that video on TH-cam holy crap!
12 firefighters, RIP.
thank you for the video
Wow. That’s amazing and terrifying at the same time
Your videos are great!!!
It doesn’t matter what, life is more important then anything. People should not lose their life’s this way because of negligence. I pray for all the families and people. ❤️🙏🏼
That plant literally got blown off the map. It’s not there anymore.
Wait, what did the dispatcher meant "they have a fire out there again" 1:21 ?
Probably as in "to reiterate". Her previous sentence was "Westfire, This is a response to West Fertilizer Plant" and after "again" she said "Westfire out to West Fertilizer Plant".
Seems ironical that the city filed a lawsuit against the plant, as it was the city's own encroachment onto the land between the city and the original defined distance between the plant and said city.
Ironical in that sense, not the remaining issues of wrongful stuff the plant seems to have done there.
Edit; Oh, right, forgot that in the U.S. often the only means to get compensation is through lawsuits. Ba-dda-bing ba-dda-bam (boom seems to've been in poor taste)
It's far worse in tejus.
This is nuts. You do not mess with ammo nitrate, remember the explosion in Lebanon?
I'm sorry but most of the "plants" shown are petrochemical style plants not these small mom and pop feed and seed stores built to serve the agriculture industry. To show the true danger you should have concentrated on these smaller feed and fertilizer warehouses. While they are necessary, and originally when built, remote, the towns built up around them. While the facility has enough blame to go around, the towns and Counties should share the blame for allowing schools, apartment buildings and nursing homes to be built around them since these feed and fertilizer facilities existed long before most of these structures were ever thought of and were built along and adjacent to railroad tracks needed for the inbound transportation of these needed products. This is like people that build near Interstate Highways or Railroad Tracks complaining about the noise when the roads were there long before the homeowners were born.
Can't believe it's been 10 years already. 😕
Thanks for annotating the unit cpnversions 🙏 😊
Being from Texas I guess they never heard about the Texas City Disaster.
Yes. April 16th, 1947. Leveled the entire city.
Which one? Got a few to choose from. Texas in particular deals in high-risk industrial enterprise quite a bit, and they don't seem to be the most energetic about safety concerns - to put it diplomatically. Everything's bigger in Texas, including the casualty lists.
The city government officials should be held responsible for this accident and for allowing residential houses to be build that close. That’s a disaster waiting to happen. Start holding these people accountable and I bet this stuff stops
I used to work in blasting (Groundbreaking for Mining Operations) and had several duties. Some of my duties were understanding and communicating the volatility of the different materials we used. We used a very wide variety of materials from “Stick” products (dynamite is actually a brand name, much like “Freon” , and no, they don’t look like road flares. Ours were wrapped in yellow paper.). Anyway, Ammonium Nitrate is actually very stable under normal conditions. I often drove a large truck with a hopper full of it. We would then mix it with the other thing that makes it an explosive (I’m not going to just come right out and say it, but if you know, then you know) and put it in drill holes in solid rock. At this point, you definitely don’t want to be messing around!
Up until it’s mixed, we walk in it, shovel it, whatever. It’s just a nuisance…. Until it’s mixed…
I had just moved to Waco Texas, working as a butcher for HEB grocery. We were moving into our new home when suddenly everything shook and rattled and we went out on the balcony and could see the huge column rising. We were 36 miles south of west. Video, pictures, nothing can capture what we saw going into West as HEB emergency aid crew. HEB always sent crews into disaster areas, to take physical aid, water, Gatorade, whatever was needed to support first responders and do search in severely damaged areas. I read the comments of people and they should have done this and never done that. People died, brothers, dad's, someone's family members. Before you point fingers, you should have been with me walking thru it. I promise, u would post some of the bullshit posted.
This video not only dumbed it down for me, but it was pretty interesting to learn about. I'm surprised this never made headlines, even in the DFW area.
Great production quality. You should do a story on the Wason Grinding explosion in Houston.
Don't know if you're taking requests, but it would be awesome if you could cover the Humberto Vidal explosion that happened in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, in 1996.
Love your content, been a fan for a long time!
It mentions Anhydrous Ammonia being a flammable gas, it’s not. It’s a non-combustible gas. It shows it right on the tank with the green placard.
Agree. It's a nasty chemical to be anywhere near, though.
I disagree... while it falls into the general category of a nonflammable gas, there have been explosions from ignition of anhydrous NH4, with Houston being an example.
I see what you’re saying it does have a flammable range 15% to 25%. So yeah it can burn. That would be 15,000-25,000 ppm. Lethal concentration is just over 3,000ppm. I feel like they would have noticed a leak before it contributed to the explosion.
It is VERY deadly if it leaks. Even diluted ammonia is NASTY!😮
My dad works in a similar field. After this happened, they got inspected along with every other fertilizer seller in the state. This kind of event is pretty rare when proper safety measures are taken.
I mean, we have blast equivalent of small nuclear device here.
❤s to all the warriors that made it through this battle. 😢
I lived in hillsboro which is a small city about 15 to 20 minutes from there. I was maybe 14 or 15 when it happened, i was in my room and heard a loud boom that shook my windows and knocked stuff off the selfs. Me and my mom went outside thinking it was thunder or a train since we lived by train tracks. A few minutes later endless sirens trailed the road by my house so i went to go watch and it was endless i mean endless fire apparatus, police, ems all headed to that direction. Me being always interested in the fire service went and turned on my scanner and thats when dispatcher said there has been a explosion at the west fertilizer plant. We need any and all available fire and ems units to respond, they have multiple firefighters down. I froze, i knew many firefighters in my county and figured at least a handful would be on scene. Hours went on and so did the endless sirens. At the end we came to find out me and my family had a good friend who was a volunteer for Abbott that was on scene. Him and multiple others had went in 10 seconds before it blew.
I lived in Austin, TX when this occurred. I happened to be driving through West, TX on the way to Dallas, the very moment the "Last Call" procession was taking place. About half the cars on the freeway pulled over as the trucks crossed the overpass, and I remember having a very somber moment when I realized what the procession of fire trucks and police vehicles was for.
Even now I'm shaken by the memory of it, of how many first responders lost their lives in that explosion. God bless them all.
You make good videos
I had a massive explosion in my toilet after eating taco bell
I remembered this incident. I was living in Fort Worth at the time, a good seventy miles north. We could see the smoke from the taller buildings downtown.
One thing about this that I noticed is that the town grew around the factory
I live about an hour or so away from Waco when this happened. We could feel the explosion all the way in Ennis. The next day my teacher was showing us the explosion footage
If you look in the area for 2013 on google maps, you'll see the damage. The remnants of the factory, the boarded up windows, etc.
Ah yes, a local disaster for me...
Good ol' Texas...
I never realized how poorly this disaster was handled
Complete and utter negligence across the board. No other way to word it.
Governments need to take more responsibility when they're in charge of dealing with dangers like this.
Bet you like the taste of leather too...
@@I_Dont_Answer_Questions Is this some inside joke I'm not aware of?
It's ultimately who the people ELECT! Garbage in, garbage out!☹️
@@theminingassassin16 he's calling you a bootlicker, idk why considering that's not what you meant?
@@Raven-yv6di Yeah, that's not even close to what I meant. I was stating that government bodies and/or agencies tasked with supervising safety standards need to ensure that violations such as this don't happen. However, when they do occur, they provide proper punishments and penalties for those who committed the offenses.
I don't know how they possibly took what I said as being a bootlicker. Perhaps they were being a troll or something.
My grandfather used to work there but was off work during the explosion he was not happy about how they were storing the firtilizer materials. It is believed an electrical short next to flammable material caused the fire wich then contributed to the blast.
Felt it all the way to the house i used to live in Peoria.
It’s amazing that nature does that degree of devastation for tens of miles with some of the ef5 tornadoes every year…
We felt this at my job when it happened.
I live about 18 mi from there I felt that
Why does it seem like catastrophic explosions due to negligence and corner-cutting always happen in Texas?
Sure, other places have had catastrophic explosions, but not specifically caused by greed and incompetence.
I don't think there's ever been a routine call to a fertilizer plant.
I remember this. I lived almost an hour away, we heard the explosion. It sounded like distant thunder.
Government: "hey so you need to inform us if you have more than the legal limit of highly explosive material stored on your property. So we can fine you more money for failing to adequately inform us."
Also government: "why did no one inform us of illegally stored materials?"
"There's another fire on the west side -- we need West Fire out at the West Fertilizer Plant in West, Texas immediately. Head west down Western Ave and meet us at the west gate."
7:26 Great example of the incompressibility of water in the tank.
I've had family in the West/ Hillsboro/Whitney area my whole life. Such a tragedy what happened there.
I live about 15 miles away from the site. We felt the explosion and went outside to see if a tree had fallen on the house. People in this area worked on fund raisers for at least a year. The plant is not big like in the pictures. The fire department was a VFD.
We had just moved to Waco when this happened. We heard it & our windows shook.
This plant was a domestic terrorist and a methamphetamine cooks wet dream. The fact that they had no real security in place boggles my mind. Luckily no one blew up an office building somewhere using some of the ridiculous amounts of chemicals there
Texas officers said that no company storing potentially hazardous materials must report such conditions to their communities - because that information is available "elsewhere." I believe that was Governor Abbott's statement - when he was attorney general during this tragedy. I'm sure his "thoughts and prayers" went out to the families of the dead - particularly to the families of the fifteen volunteer firefighters who were murdered during this "criminal act."
reminds me of enschede firework disaster, also happened in the middle of a neighbourhood
Seeds are surprise, surprise full of fats and oils...which are highly flammable. Chances are the seed room lacked adequate ventilation too. Also can seeds spontaneously combust like wood mulch or hay can?
i think so. They sell those fabric bags full of seeds that you put in the microwave. People's beds have caught fire putting those things under the blankets. I stick to using a hot water bottle.
how were they fined only $180 000?? ordinary people pay more than 3x that for a heart surgery and these guys basically bombed a town through laziness???
these kinds of disasters should have fines in the billions at LEAST, including prison time for whoever was in charge of the place
To anyone wondering about the site itself, what was left of the site was levelled and cleared. It today sits as an empty field.
That fire chief and mayor should be ashamed and held accountable. No previous training on how to combat the fire? Allowing parks and homes to be that close? It may be a small town in texas but come on. I hope the first responders werent volunteers if it makes a difference. They all had bigger balls than 90% of the population.
The land around industrial areas is dirt cheap for a reason. The danger of machinery failure or explosions, and pollution levels are unsuitable for living. But to big money brokers, they don't give a shit. They see cheap land and say "sold! build a condo there" "build a school there".
@@MrWolfSnackThis is where proper ZONING comes in!!!
I remember one of the causes was rumored to be sparks caused by the use of metal rakes to mix and aerate the seeds in the seed holding compartment.
You should cover the Yaffe Iron & Metal Co. explosion of Dec 2004, next year will be the 20th anniversary. I was miles away in my backyard in Muskogee OK, when I saw the flash and then a moment later the soundwave knocked me on my ass. My dog went nuts, car alarms went off, it actually shifted the foundation of the house by an inch or two.
It killed two men and injured a dozen more.
Sad story
I remember hearing about this incident.
🙏😔🙏😔🙏😔🙏😔🙏😔🙏😔🙏😔🙏😔🙏😔
There is nothing "routine" about a fire at a fertilizer plant.
It was stated a couple of times that anhydrous ammonia is flammable. To set the record straight, it is a nonflammable gas but will ignite at a temperature of 1204°F within vapor concentration limits between 15% and 28%. (Paper ignites at 450°F, coal at 750°F). As an ammonia refrigeration tech and operator, I will say it can explode, but at high temperatures. It won't just burn like propane or other petroleum based gasses. Don't get me wrong, anhydrous ammonia is no joke. 2,500 to 4,500 ppm is lethal in 30 minutes. It's not the same stuff we buy in grocery stores. Also at any plant or job location, there's a set standard of how much of it can be stored on site.
Texas fans when their neighborhoods don’t freeze or explode
They could’ve had dry chemical extinguishers but not water sprinklers, as the water melts the fertilizer, making it unusable. Dry chem would’ve been perfect for this scenario