Bad explosion near Waco
Horrific explosion in a fertilizer plant near Waco, Texas, with many injured and many feared dead.
I am not a conspiracist. And this is, after all, a fertilizer plant. Fertilizer is highly explosive, and I don’t see why a fertilizer plant would be a target. So my guess is that this is an accident. But I can’t help but notice that Friday is the 20th anniversary of the Waco siege.
This has certainly been a dreadful week.
Not all fertilizers are explosive, only ammonia nitrate. Still there is no information about type of fertilizer produced at this plant. What is strange, firefighters were not aware about danger. But the power of explosion was so terrible that 2.1 magnitude earthquake was registered. So it must have been ammonia nitrate. One barrel of this stuff destroyed Oklahoma state building. What dozen tonnes can produce is comparable to small nuke.
This is near where I live. If I hear anything I’ll send it along. This is related and maybe of interest google: Texas City explosion 1947
I believe the Texas City catastrophe happened on the same date.
Ironically, my grandmother lives less than a mile from the Monsanto plant in texas city (the epicenter of the 1947 explosion). I go jogging over there all the time when i’m visiting my family.
If people are interested in following this story via crowdsourcing / underground media, here you go –>
http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1ckq0o/fertilizer_plant_explosion_in_waco_texas_some/
I live in Cypress — the place where that kid with the knife ran around stabbing his classmates – it’s about an hour drive to Texas City. There’s always something blowing up in Texas City. A BP refinery blew up a couple of times; last time was 2005.
Prayers for the folks in West.
A couple of weeks ago, I had a book event in a suburb of Fort Worth, and we drove up I-35. We stopped in West at the Czech Stop Bakery for kolaches for a second breakfast. I wrote it up as a little hiccup of a town, but the bakery is famous among Texas foodies, apparently. There are so many small towns like this out here – small, friendly, and very tight-knit. This will just devastate the town, as most of the dead are volunteer firefighters and EMS.
My wife and I have been in Arkansas for the last ten days visiting her family. Her brother has a place on a lake near Hot Springs. With all the family coming and going, along with much conversation we have been out of touch. Yep, no TV, no cell phones, no computers. We were shocked when we headed for the Little Rock airport and discovered that all hell had broken loose during our exercise in family love and unity. We felt like turning around and heading back to the peace and quiet of the lake.
On our second day there we had a get together with some of my wife’s high school classmates. Two of them live in Waco. We just received an e-mail saying they were well clear of the fertilizer blast zone and are okay.
Do not know why the fertilizer plant was so close to apartments and houses. It would seem sensible to restrict any habitable buildings to a mile or more away form such explosive potential.
Boston was not such a shock. I’ve been expecting another shoe to drop. We’ve been very lucky (or skillful) in deterring the jihadis since 9/11. I may eat my words but am pretty sure this was an Islamist terror attack. The MO is pretty clear. Except this time they weren’t suicide murderers, just plain murderers.
Describing this as a “fertilizer plant” is a misnomer. Growing up on a farm in rural Iowa I’m pretty familar with fertilizer storage facilities. In checking the town on Google maps satellite images I can tell this is a grain company with anhydrous ammonia storage tanks. NH3 is storaged as a compressed gas and is also pretty flammable when exposed to air. I doubt greatly if the explosion has anything to do with ammonium nitrate. IIRC that has to be mixed with other chemicals (hydrocarbons like desiel fuel for one) to become truly explosive. I’m sure it would burn or its dust might explosively combust like grain dust. That might also be a factor in the explosions since I can see several large grain storage bins in the picture as well.
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