AP PHOTO/LM OTERO
PLAYING
WITH FIRE
up in the shadow of the plant.
Town leaders built an intermediate school about a tenth of a mile
across the railroad tracks from the
plant. The nursing home also sits
within eyesight of the plant, part
of the gradual expansion of homes
and businesses. Because the facility was built so long ago, local zoning regulations primarily governed
what could be built near it.
Ed Sykora, who owns a local
Ford dealership in West and has
been displaced from his home
since Wednesday, was on the town
school board and city council
for more than a dozen years. He
HUFFINGTON
04.28.13
doesn’t remember any discussion
of whether it made sense to build
new homes and a new school so
close to the fertilizer plant.
“The land was available out
there that way; they could get
sewer and other stuff that way
without building a bunch of new
lines,” Sykora recalled. “There
never was any thought about it.
Maybe that was wrong.”
Rejcek, the farmer, said he remembered some in town who worried about building a school near
the plant. “There have always been
questions about that,” he said,
calling that decision “a mistake.”
Yet even in recent reports, 7FFP