Texas explosion, local questions

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/04/2013 (4772 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Anyone who has seen video of the fertilizer plant explosion in the Texas town of West will not soon forget it.

It’s recorded from what seems like a safe distance. The fire burns way off across a field, behind a fence, trees and other buildings.

It’s a very large fire and it’s roaring.

“It should collapse,” says the man making the recording, later identified as Derrick Hurtt.

But it doesn’t collapse. Quite the opposite. With a sudden CRACK! the building explodes. It knocks the camera out of Hurtt’s hands and it instantly deafens both him and his daughter, Khloey, whose terrified cries are heart-rending:

“Dad! Dad! I can’t hear, I can’t hear! Get out of here! Please get out of here!”

By all accounts, the pair are OK (they did manage to upload the video, after all) and their deafness has faded.

“Her inner ear is a little sore,” Hurtt told NBC’s “Today” show yesterday morning. “We do have our full hearing.”

Dozens of others, however, were not so lucky.

Initial reports said up to 15 people were killed in the explosion, many of them volunteer firefighters who had rushed into the inferno in a vain attempt to put it out. More than 160 people were sent to hospital.

The blast registered at 2.1 on the Richter scale and knocked down dozens of nearby buildings. Windows were blown out more than 10 km away and people who were 65 km away say they could still hear it.

That’s like an explosion in Brandon that people in Virden could make out.

Unfortunately, it’s not just a thought experiment.

Although most of us manage to go about our daily business — working, shopping, eating and sleeping —without thinking too much about it, there’s a large fertilizer plant on the outskirts of Brandon, too.

The Koch plant, formerly Simplot, is much larger than the West fertilizer facility that blew up in Texas. Luckily, it’s also further away from inhabited areas.

There were two schools just across the street from the West Fertilizer plant, as well as apartment buildings and senior citizens homes within blocks. Around 80 nearby buildings were either levelled or heavily damaged.

Sun reporter Graeme Bruce spent much of yesterday being reassured by various authorities in town that a big blast at the Koch Fertilizer plant —while terrifying — would be met with a trained, co-ordinated response.

That immediate area around 17th Street East contains mostly other industrial plants. There’s almost nothing to the east and the nearest schools and homes are a good distance west.

An explosion on the scale that happened in Texas would also send a plume of dangerous ammonia gas into the air. In Texas, they chose to evacuate two square miles — the same area in Brandon would stretch from Victoria Avenue East to Richmond Avenue East, from First Street all the way to 33rd Street East.

And that’s with favourable weather.

As in Brandon, the West Fertilizer plant was located downwind of the community. But prevailing winds can’t always be counted on. Officials in Texas also had a secondary evacuation zone in mind, in case an approaching storm had changed the winds and blown ammonia back over the town.

A situation like that in Brandon could see unfavourable winds pushing dangerous gases over almost the entire city.

It’s chilling to see the map on our front page, overlaying those Texas evacuation zones and areas of devastation onto Brandon at the same scale. The only difference is that we rotated the maps to adjust for our prevailing westerly winds, rather than their northerlies.

Authorities here say that an incident like that would be wildly unprecedented and almost impossible to plan for. But we were gratified to learn that they have contingency plans in place for most things and that they were happy to share some of them with us.

We hope that those plans never have to be put into practice.

Meanwhile, wearied rescue workers continue to search through the wreckage of West.

Our thoughts are with them.