PLAYING
WITH FIRE
in a risk-management plan for
dealing with the tanks.
None of these agencies, however, regulate ammonium nitrate.
The Texas Department of State
Health Services was aware of the
presence of large volumes of ammonium nitrate at the plant, and
collected data on the hazardous
substance as required. But according to a Reuters story, the plant
owners never alerted the Department of Homeland Security, which
tracks and inspects facilities to
make sure the potentially deadly
chemical is stored safely.
A spokeswoman for the Texas
Department of State Health Services, Carrie Williams, wrote in an
email that the agency’s role is only
to provide data on chemicals for
more than 65,000 facilities across
the state. Williams said the agency
is not required to report ammonium nitrate quantities to DHS.
“Our authority does not include
oversight of the amounts, locations
or types of chemicals that may be
stored there,” she wrote.
It’s unclear whether DHS, had
it known about the ammonium
nitrate, would have required additional safety measures and installation of protective barriers that
could have prevented the explosion,
HUFFINGTON
04.28.13
“WE’VE DONE A
LOT OF CRYING. AND
WE’VE GOT A LOT
OF CRYING IN THE
DAYS AHEAD.”
or limited the damage in West.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (DMiss.), the ranking member of
the House Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement
that it seemed as if the plant was
“willfully off the grid.”
Carman, the former staffer for
the agency, said the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the EPA focus their attention on potential violations of the
Clean Air Act; under that standard, small plants like the one in
West pose much less of a threat
than, say, a huge chemical factory
in Houston, he said.
But a smaller threat is not the
same as no threat, as residents
here learned last week.
“We’ve done a lot of crying,” said
George Smith, the West EMS director. “And we’ve got a lot of
crying in th