The middle school that was destroyed was within 1000 feet of the fertilizer plant that blew up. Lucky the explosion happened at 6:30 pm or there might be a lot of little bodies under the rubble. Hey, zoning is apparently not a thing in West, Texas.
The fertilizer plant had little or nothing in the way of safety features. They had self-reported to their regulators that “there was no danger.” (Remember, it was fertilizer that served as the basis for the bomb that blew up the Murtagh building in Oklahoma City). No danger. And the Texas regulators let it slide.
This is what small government advocates are all about. This is what deregulation is all about: deregulated economies blow up, deregulated industrial facilities blow up, because it’s cheaper not to address safety concerns, or to limit profits in the name of fiscal sanity.
You CANNOT trust businesses and corporations to do the right thing absent tough oversight. Self-reporting is just another name for lying. And the end result is
KABOOM!!!
Remember that when next you hear conservatives and libertarians defaming government oversight.
Zoning is a form of regulation. you cannot put public schools next to nuclear waste dumps, and probably can’t put them next to fertilizer factories. I could be wrong about that, I hope not.
True story: when I went to grade school in Iceland the Quonset huts the students studied in were next to an abandoned mine field. We were expressly forbidden to go there!
But nothing about the absence of zoning requires that the government put the school next to the plant.
To put it another way, if you think this government made a bad decision in where it placed its school, why do think it would have made a better decision about where to place its schools when drawing a zoning map?
The school was on a US military base in Iceland – think DEW line. I do not know why they had a mine field. The base might have been built in WWII to protect Allied shipping initially, with some thought that the Nazis might make a ground assault? Or maybe just Cold War paranoia during the 50s? Iceland has a socialist government now and may have had one back then … might even have been fears of the natives getting restless … though that seems the most unlikely theory.
I think the placement was bad irrelevant of whether it was based on a zoning map or not. Granted, fertilizer plants may have seemed less dangerous back in the sixties.
In 1947 we had the Texas City explosion where the detonation of ammonia nitrate caused the deaths of a little under 500 people with about 5,000 injured.
Most likely a result of WWII as Evil Captor mentioned, at the beginning of the war Iceland was part of a union with Denmark and it was originally neutral during WWII, but Hitler invaded Denmark and the strategic location of Iceland guaranteed that it was going to be a battleground too.
After the takeover of Denmark the Germans tried to control Iceland but the British controlled the seas and then invaded the island, the invasion met little to no opposition from the few Germans that attempted to control the island, Iceland remained “neutral” but Iceland did accept the de facto occupation by the allies.
The British and then the Americans had bases in Iceland that were also protected with mine fields to prevent the Germans from attempting any landings like the British made early.
Well the lands probally cheaper, and there’d be less opposition from neighbors than in a residential area.
Iceland was to Denmark as Canada was to the UK; independent countries sharing the same monarch and with the mother country carrying out foriegn relations.
It’s a similar story with compounding pharmacies. There have been a couple attempts to introduce regulations on the industry, including one by Ted Kennedy (among others) in 2007. The industry lobbied against it and it never even got to a vote.
The fungal meningitis outbreak last fall killed 48 people in 23 states. It was traced to contaminated steroid injections produced at a compounding pharmacy near Boston.
Regulations can go too far, but there are cases like this where they don’t go far enough.
Which as I recall was also partly a matter of improper safety precautions. The ship of AN that exploded was allowed to dock at a shorter, more convenient dock rather than the long one that was supposed to be used for potentially explosive cargo. This resulted in the explosion being far nearer and able to do far more damage.
The explosions of the two ships were so powerful that it’s extremely doubtful that docking a little further away would have made much difference.
What’s generally reported is that improper firefighting techniques contributed to the initial massive explosion (i.e. trying to smother burning fertilizer with hot steam, which didn’t exactly cool things off).
Are you living in an alternative universe where there are no regulators? Both the EPA and the Texas Commision on Environmental Quality investigated this plant and found no problems. It still blew up. The regulations failed, so you blame it on lack of regulation?