PLAYING
WITH FIRE
“It’s been there so long that you
just take it for granted,” said Jeanette Karlik, a columnist for the
local newspaper, the West News.
That same attitude — the assumption that nothing of consequence could go wrong here -- appears to have shaped the actions
of the seven or more state and federal regulatory agencies that collectively shared oversight responsibility for the plant, according to
a Huffington Post investigation.
Through interviews with former
regulators and community leaders, as well as a review of hundreds of pages of documents going back to 1976, a sense emerges
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. No
one effectively prepared for the
emergency that eventually materialized, leaving this community
uniquely vulnerable to the tragedy
that unfolded last week when the
plant caught fire and exploded,
killing 14 people and ripping apart
an apartment building, a school
and dozens of homes.
In June 2011 — less than two
years before the explosion — the
private company that owns the
HUFFINGTON
04.28.13
THE LAST TIME
REGULATORS PERFORMED
A FULL SAFETY
INSPECTION OF THE
FACILITY WAS NEARLY
28 YEARS AGO.
plant, the West Fertilizer Co.,
filed an emergency response plan
with the Environmental Protection Agency stating that there
was “no” risk of fire or explosion
at the facility. The worst scenario
that plant officials acknowledged was the possible release of
a small amount of ammonia gas
into the atmosphere.
Fertilizer long has been recognized as a dangerous combustible
material. One variety, ammonium
nitrate — a pellet-shaped product
typically shipped in large bags —
caused the deadliest industrial
accident in American history, the
explosion of a ship at the port of
Texas City in 1947, which took the
lives of more than 500 people.
In 1995, Timothy McVeigh used
about two tons of ammonium
nitrate to blow up the federal
building in Oklahoma City, killing
168 people. As recently as 2012,
the West Fertilizer plant held