The Dallas Morning News says that the whole town is now being evacuated. I imagine that’s got to be a chaotic process under these conditions. There may not have been time to do it before the explosion, and people may have thought that sheltering in place was the safer option if an explosion was imminent.
Really? This is what your mind puts together at a time like this?
I think it’s just an industrial accident. The deliberate part may be failure to follow regulations or ignore obvious dangers, but it seems very unlikely someone would start a fire there in order to trigger an explosion.
This isn’t unusual. Over the past thirty years I recall other accidents at fertilizer plants. This one seems bigger and more lethal than most. Processing that material is dangerous work.
Who owns the plant?
Scary YouTube video of the explosion. This man and his daughter were videoing the already sizeable fire when the explosion happens during the recording. It was huge and terrifying, the girl repeats she can’t hear anything - and they were FAR from the plant. I’m glad they seem ultimately OK.
I have been through that town many times during my college years and growing up. I remember some very good kolaches being made locally and we would stop when we were driving through and load up. This is a very small town and may very well be destroyed from what I can see.
This is really shaping up to be a crappy week. And we are only at Wednesday.
Dur. It’s the same video linked in the Yahoo article in the OP.
I don’t want to seem callous but having lived in Houston chemical plant fires/blasts were common, I can in fact clearly remember two REALLY bad ones.
The one in France is about the worst I can recall. These plants require very strict safety measures and constant inspections. Accidents still happen because of human or mechanical error.
Nice, 60 people die and somehow you managed to turn it into a childish political rant.
The USGS picked up this explosion as a 2.1 on the Richter scale. That is only a measure of ground motion, and the air motion was much worse.
For comparison sake, the Oklahoma City bombing of the Murrah Federal Building registered a 3.0 on the Richter scale.
On the personal side… Come morning I’ll have to find out if my 87 year old grandmother, a retired nurse living in Waco, has gone to help at her old hospital. It has had more than 100 patients already.
I was coming in with the exact same link.
My first thought when I heard this news this morning was “Will shit please stop blowing up”. I don’t care whether it’s deliberate or, as I suspect in this case, a horrible accident. Shit needs to stop exploding.
My second thought, having seen the video, was “That makes the bombs in Boston look like party poppers.” And I don’t mean to belittle Monday’s events by saying that.
The shits gonna hit the fan once the sun comes up. I dread seeing the damage thats been done. It sounds like it’ll be really bad.
Sunrise is only 1 1/2 hours away. About 7:15 Central and the news helicopters can start filming.
I used to live just a few miles away from that plant. It’s already a fairly economically-depressed area; I can’t even imagine what this will do to West.
D-bear, just as political jabs were out of place in the MPSIMS thread about Boston, they’re out of place here. If you want to talk politics, go to GD, Elections, or the Pit – but don’t do it here.
twickster, MPSIMS moderator
The news today says that authorities have confirmed 5 to 15 people killed, but the toll could rise.
Technically, a range like that doesn’t exactly sound like “confirmation,” but maybe there are five confirmed dead and another ten known to be missing.
Anhydrous ammonia is pure NH3 that’s been produced by chemical synthesis. Ammonia forms an azeotrope with water- that is, pure NH3 cannot be isolated by distillation and will spontaneously absorb water it’s exposed to. Many chemical reactions involving ammonia require it be anhydrous.
An attack on the West! The tinfoil army are going to have a ball with this one.