PLAYING
WITH FIRE
to extinguish the fire or to evacuate nearby residents. Both options
present serious hazards, he said,
and the reality may be that there is
time for neither.
“It’s like you’re on the top of
Mt. Everest and someone pulls
a gun on you,” he said. “You can
jump or get shot. There are no
good choices.”
Smith, West’s director of
emergency medical services, also
oversees the West Rest Haven
Nursing Home. He helped evacuate 127 patients there as the fire
raged at the nearby plant. All the
residents made it out before the
blast, but Smith wasn’t so lucky.
The explosion sent a shock wave
through the building and the roof
collapsed on him.
The only thing that saved him
was a counter at the nurse’s station, which shielded him from
the beams that fell from above.
“God said, ‘You have more work
to do, my son,’” Smith said.
Next, he sprang into action
as the EMS director, frantically
sending text and radio messages
to any jurisdiction that would
listen. Volunteer firefighters from
the town, along with emergency
responders and an off-duty Dallas firefighter, converged on the
HUFFINGTON
04.28.13
“NO EXPLOSIONS
LIKE THIS EVER FIT
INTO THE DRILLS.”
plant. Ten of those first responders died in the explosion.
“Some people think we’re crazy, because when everybody else
is running from something, we’re
running into it,” Smith said of
his EMS colleagues. “We know in
our hearts that anything we do
is dangerous. We’re saving lives.
We’re doing God’s work as far as
I’m concerned.”
Should the authorities in West
have evacuated rather than battle
the blaze? Experts say that question cannot be answered absent a
full investigation, and even then it
may never be possible to determine
with authority what went wrong
here. Fires at industrial facilities
are inherently dangerous and can
have unexpected consequences.
Frazier, the emergency management coordinator in Brazos
county, was unwilling to secondguess his counterparts in West.
There was but one certain difference between the 2009 explosion
in Bryan and the one that killed
people here: “We got lucky,” he
said, “and they didn’t.”