Rescue crews sift blast site in Texas; toll as many as 15

Firefighters search through the ruins of an apartment complex destroyed Wednesday night when the West Fertilizer Co.’s plant in West, Texas, exploded, killing as many as 15 people and injuring more than 160, officials said.
Firefighters search through the ruins of an apartment complex destroyed Wednesday night when the West Fertilizer Co.’s plant in West, Texas, exploded, killing as many as 15 people and injuring more than 160, officials said.

WEST, Texas - Rescue workers searched the rubble of a fertilizer plant Thursday, looking for missing firefighters and survivors of a huge explosion Wednesday night that tore through the small central Texas town of West, killing as many as 15 people and injuring more than 160 others, authorities said.

Homes and businesses were leveled in the normally quiet town just north of Waco, and there was widespread destruction in the downtown area, Sgt. William Patrick Swanton of the Waco Police Department said Thursday.

“At some point,” he said, “this will turn into a recovery operation, but at this point, we are still in search and rescue.”

Swanton described search-and-rescue efforts as “tedious and time-consuming,” noting that crews had to shore up much of the wreckage before going in.

Crews in West, Texas searched through the night for survivors and victims of Wednesday's explosion. Early estimates say between five and 15 people were killed. Authorities say they are still conducting a search and rescue operation.

Police: Between 5 and 15 dead in TX blast

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Searchers “have not gotten to the point of no return where they don’t think that there’s anybody still alive,” Swanton said. He did not know how many people had been rescued.

There was no indication the blast, which sent up a mushroom-shaped plume of smoke and blew a crater in the ground, was a criminal act, he said, “but we’re not ruling that out.”

The explosion rained burning embers and debris on terrified residents. The blast was so powerful that the U.S. Geological Survey registered it as a 2.1-magnitude earthquake. The landscape was blanketed with acrid smoke and strewn with the shattered remains of buildings, furniture and personal belongings.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry called the explosion “a truly nightmare scenario” and said that information about death and injury is “very preliminary.” But because West is so small, he said, “this tragedy has most likely hit every family. It has touched practically everybody in that town.”

The fires in the plant were still smoldering, Swanton said Thursday morning, but“there is nothing out of control over there at this point.”

At least five people were killed and scores were being treated at area hospitals, Swanton said, while emphasizing that early estimates of casualties could change. Three to five firefighters were missing, he said, mostly first responders from a volunteer fire department who rushed to the scene before the blast.

“They were actively fighting the fire at the time the explosion occurred,” he said.

Perry Calvin, 37, a married father of two with a third on the way, was one of the missing volunteer firefighters. He had been attending an emergency-medical technician class in West on Wednesday evening when a firefighter in the class got a page about the fire at the fertilizer company, said his father, Phil Calvin.

Perry Calvin and another man drove to the scene together and got there before the explosion. The other man was found dead Wednesday night.

“It doesn’t look good, but we don’t have anything confirmed yet,” Phil Calvin, the fire chief in the town of Navarro Mills, Texas, said Thursday afternoon.

About an hour after he spoke those words, he got the news, sitting by the phone at his home in nearby Frost: His son was indeed among the dead.

As many as 75 homes were damaged, along with several businesses and a 50-unit apartment complex.

“Part of that community is gone,” Swanton said.

Dogs trotted through deserted streets in cordoned-off neighborhoods around the decimated plant. The entire second floor of a nearby apartment complex was destroyed, leaving bricks and mattresses among the rubble. One rescue crew going from apartment to apartment gave special attention to a room where only a child’s red and blue bunk bed remained.

While the community tended to its wounds, investigators awaited clearance to enter the blast zone for clues to what set off the plant’s huge stockpile of volatile chemicals.

“It’s still too hot to get in there,” said Franceska Perot, a spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The White House issued a statement from President Barack Obama that said: “Today our prayers go out to the people of West, Texas.” He pledged that the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other federal agencies would join state and local efforts “to make sure there are no unmet needs as search and rescue and response operations continue.”

Obama phoned the Texas governor from Air Force One on his way to Boston.

The disaster began with a smaller fire at the plant, West Fertilizer, just off Interstate 35, about 20 miles north of Waco. Local volunteer firefighters responded, said U.S. Rep. Bill Flores.

“The fire spread and hit some of these tanks that contain chemicals to treat the fertilizer,” Flores said, “and there was an explosion, which caused wide damage.”

West Mayor Tommy Muska, said in brief televised remarks that 50 to 60 houses in a five-block area were heavily damaged, and that search and-rescue teams worked through the night. A nursing home, with 133 residents, was among the structures hit. The fate of its residents was not immediately clear.

In a telephone interview with the Los Angeles Times, Muska said he believed 35 to 40 died in the plant explosion.

“We are out there searching the rubble, looking in each and every house. We are trying to locate each and every citizen,” Muska said.

Muska said he arrived at the count of 35 to 40 dead because all other residents and first-responders in the area have been identified. Among those who were missing and believed dead, he said, were as many as six firefighters and four emergency-medical technicians.

However, other state public-safety officials declined to say how many have died in the accident, and confirmed only that there were fatalities.

A few miles to the north of West, the school gymnasium in the town of Abbott was converted into an emergency shelter for evacuees who lived near the plant. But at 3 a.m. Thursday, the nearly 100 cots were empty, and dozens of volunteers, including faculty and teenage students, waited for a rush of people that never came. Bottles of water sat in bundled packages outside the school, untouched.

Rodney Watson, the chief deputy for the Hill County sheriff ’s office, said he believed those who were evacuated were staying with friends or relatives.

“Right now, there’s not a whole lot that can be done,” he said. “They got the fire contained, and there’s no immediate danger with the chemicals or anything. There’s no haz-mat situation.”

A spokesman for the FBI in San Antonio said Thursday morning that there has been no indication of criminal activity in the plant explosion. The spokesman, Special Agent Erik Vasys, said the agency has personnel there to assist local officials if needed. The ATF is on the scene, and the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, the federal entity that investigates chemical disasters, said it has sent its own investigative team to the site, which was to arrive Thursday afternoon, according to the agency.

The Red Cross in the Dallas and Fort Worth region said in a statement posted online that it had crews on the way to help. Red Cross workers were looking for a safe place to house residents who had been displaced.

Swanton said the town would help its own.

“I can promise you that the city of West will not let a person stand out in the rain,” he said. “They will bring you into their home, and you will be comfortable.”

Records reviewed by The Associated Press show the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration fined West Fertilizer $10,000 last summer for safety violations that included planning to transport anhydrous ammonia without a security plan. An inspector also found the plant’s ammonia tanks weren’t properly labeled.

The government accepted$5,250 after the company took what it described as corrective actions, the records show. It is not unusual for companies to negotiate lower fines with regulators.

In a risk-management plan filed with the Environmental Protection Agency about a year earlier, the company said 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.

State officials require all facilities that handle anhydrous ammonia to have sprinklers and other safety measures because it is a flammable substance, according to Mike Wilson, head of air permitting for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

But inspectors would not necessarily check for such mechanisms, and it’s not known whether they did when the West plant was last inspected in 2006, said Ramiro Garcia, head of enforcement and compliance.

That inspection followed a complaint about a strong ammonia smell, which the company resolved by obtaining a new permit, said the commission’s executive director, Zak Covar. He said no other complaints had been filed with the state since then, so there haven’t been additional inspections.

Gary Adair, son of the plant’s owner, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that the decades-old West Fertilizer Co. plant had been closed for about three hours at the time of the explosion. He said the family had no idea what caused the fire and explosion.

Covar said during the governor’s news conference that the company has been in business since 1962 and is one of a number of small fertilizer companies across rural Texas.

Because it was built in 1962, the facility was grandfathered into state regulations, Covar said. The company was supposed to get reauthorized in 2004, but failed to do so. Covar would not speculate on the reason.

He also said that currently, the agency did not detect health hazards in the air near the facility.

Perry, in response to questions, declined to speculate about whether the regulatory financing and oversight was adequate.

West is a town of 2,700 people. Its name refers not to its location in north-central Texas but to its first postmaster, T.M. West.

An estimated 300 to 400 first responders and officials from numerous local, state and federal agencies - sheriff’s deputies, volunteer firefighters, ATF agents, police officers, medics, constables - have converged on West, as have dozens of reporters from media outlets around the country and the world.

The grass behind West Church of Christ became a parking lot for the triage area overnight; the auction barn off Interstate 35 - with a sign reading “Cattle Sale Thursday” - was turned into a staging site for news conferences. Those speaking at the conferences had to raise their voices to be heard above the cows mooing in the nearby livestock pens.

Residents who were evacuated from their homes waited for information from authorities on what, if anything, was left standing.

Misty Kaska and her husband, Brian, and 1-year-old daughter live in a home about 100 yards from the plant. They were in Waco when they got word that the plant was burning and asked her brother to go check the home.

The plant exploded while he was on the way.

“He did see the house crumble and catch on fire,” she said. “It was just rolling black smoke.”

Thursday morning, family members helped load up Kaska’s pickup with paper towels, food and other supplies.

“All of our belongings, all of the pictures of our daughter from this past year - gone. My wedding ring is gone,” she said. “We lost it all.” Information for this article was contributed by John Schwartz, Manny Fernandez, Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Christine Hauser and Ravi Somaiya of The New York Times; by Jack Gillum, John L.Mone, Nomaan Merchant, Michael Brick, Will Weissert, Angela K. Brown, Raquel Maria Dillon, Jamie Stengle, Ramit Plushnick-Masti and Seth Borenstein of The Associated Press; and by Nick Dean, Deanna Boyd and Alex Branch of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram; and by John M. Glionna and Maeve Reston of the Los Angeles Times.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/19/2013

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