LETTER FROM
THE EDITOR
HUFFINGTON
04.28.13
The View
From West
N THIS WEEK’S issue, Chris Kirkham
and Ben Hallman look
at the tragic explosion of the fertilizer plant in West,
Texas, that left 14 people dead and
a town grasping for answers.
This is a story of breakdown.
The deadly explosion was the end
result of a staggering string of
failures on the part of the regulatory agencies that exist explicitly to prevent such accidents. “A
sense emerges,” Chris and Ben
write, “that no institution sounded the alarm here, even as fertilizer piled up inside the plant, creating a potentially deadly tinderbox
in close proximity to the town.”
ART STREIBER
I
The list of players who failed to
sound those alarms is a long one.
There’s the company that owned
the plant, which in 2011 stated
that th ere was no risk of fire or
explosion. There’s the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which had not visited the
facility in nearly 30 years. And
there’s the Department of Homeland Security, which, as Chris and
Ben put it, “apparently was unaware of the plant’s existence.”
Even after the explosion, with
West residents reeling from substantial damage to nearby apart-
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