Vol. 77/No. 17      May 6, 2013

After workers had gone home for the day, members of the local volunteer fire department responded to a call to extinguish a small fire at the West Fertilizer chemical storage facility. Based on conflicting reports, somewhere between 20 and 120 minutes after the fire started, the facility exploded, registering 2.1 on the earthquake Richter Scale, and destroying more than 150 homes, a nearby intermediate school, a nursing home and two other buildings. A majority of the 14 killed were firefighters, including one who was a worker at the plant.

According to a company report filed with state and local agencies in the last year, the facility housed 110,000 pounds of anhydrous ammonia, which becomes volatile when heated to a gas, and some 270 tons of ammonium nitrate, a common fertilizer also used for bombs.

Between the reporting of the fire and the explosion there was no attempt to evacuate the area. Kevin Malar, among the surviving volunteer firefighters, said he got a call from a former manager of the fertilizer company while en route to the fire, reported the Wall Street Journal. When Malar said West Fertilizer was on fire, the caller responded, “Boy, you got to get everyone out of there — at least a quarter mile away.”

“This tragedy will continue to hurt deeply for generations to come,” West Fertilizer owner Donald Adair said in a company statement two days after the disaster. He and his wife, Vice President Wanda Adair, who is also a director of the West Chamber of Commerce, have refused phone calls from the media, according to press accounts.

The company was reportedly fined in 2006 by the Environmental Protection Agency for not updating its risk-management plan, among other violations. Last year a bureau within the Department of Transportation levied fines of $5,250 for safety violations.

In a risk-management plan filed with the Environmental Protection Agency in 2011, the company declared it was not handling flammable materials and did not have sprinklers, water-deluge systems, blast walls, fire walls or other safety mechanisms in place at the plant. “The worst-case release scenario would be the release of the total contents of a storage tank released as a gas over 10 minutes,” it stated.

Earlier this year a fire at the warehouse prompted the evacuation of a nearby school.

Much of the criticism in the big-business press has centered on the fact that plant owners did not inform the Department of Homeland Security that the facility contained 1,350 times the filing threshold for ammonium nitrate allowed under DHS regulations aimed at preventing potential bomb-making — which has nothing to do with the disaster.

Meanwhile, the last inspection by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was conducted in 1985, which resulted in a $30 fine for improper respiratory protection. OSHA currently has 2,200 inspectors for 8 million worksites nationwide. The agency conducted 4,448 inspections in Texas last year — a pace that would take 126 years to cover the state’s industrial sites.

The same day of the explosion at West Fertilizer, 12 workers were injured in a fire at Exxon’s Beaumont oil refinery.

“That company in West is just like what I see every day along the Houston ship channel,” heavy equipment operator Melvin Thomas told the Militant. “They have billions of dollars and would rather pay fines for violations than change things to make them safe. Safety is supposed to be number one, but the big companies don’t care. They just care about the money.”

Jacquie Henderson and Mike Fitzsimmons contributed to this article.
 
 
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