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The explosion was caused by ammonium nitrate???

That's the same stuff Timothy McVey used to blow up the FBI building which was the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Ammonium nitrate is also used by freedom fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan to make the IED bombs used against the invaders from the American Empire.

Ammonium nitrate by itself is a high explosive. But it's pretty hard to set the stuff off unless you have blasting caps. But now and then the stuff does go off accidentally as in this case.

Diesel oil or diesel fuel is frequently mixed with the ammonium nitrate, because it makes the explosive more powerful. But even without the diesel oil, ammonium nitrate is a very powerful explosive.

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Texas fertilizer plant explodes; dozens of injuries

By William M. Welch USA Today Wed Apr 17, 2013 10:28 PM

WEST, Texas — A massive explosion at a fertilizer plant near Waco on Wednesday night injured dozens of people and killed an unknown number of others. The blast sent flames shooting into the night sky, leaving the factory a smoldering ruin and leveling buildings for blocks in every direction.

The explosion at West Fertilizer in West, a community about 20 miles north of Waco, happened shortly before 8 p.m. and could be heard as far away as Waxahachie, 45 miles to the north.

Although authorities said it will be some time before they know the full extent of the loss of life, Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman D.L. Wilson said just after midnight that an unknown number of people had died.

West Mayor Tommy Muska told reporters that his city of about 2,800 residents needs “your prayers.”

“We’ve got a lot of people who are hurt, and there’s a lot of people, I’m sure, who aren’t gonna be here tomorrow,” Muska said. “We’re gonna search for everybody. We’re gonna make sure everybody’s accounted for. That’s the most important thing right now.”

A member of the city council, Al Vanek, said there is a four-block area around the explosion “that is totally decimated.” Wilson said the damage was comparable to the destruction caused by the 1995 bomb blast that destroyed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Muska, who is also a volunteer firefighter, said the town’s department went to the plant to fight a fire about 6:30 p.m., and the blast that followed knocked off his fire helmet and blew out the doors and windows of his home nearby.

He said main fire was under control as of 11 p.m., but residents were urged to remain indoors because of the threat of new explosions or leaks of ammonia from the plant’s ruins.

Among the damaged buildings was what appeared to be a housing complex with a collapsed roof, a nearby middle school and the West Rest Haven Nursing Home, from which first-responders evacuated 133 patients, some in wheelchairs.

“We did get there and got that taken care of,” Muska said.

Erick Perez, 21, of West, was playing basketball at a nearby school when the fire started. He and his friends thought nothing of it at first, but about a half hour later, the smoke changed color. The blast threw him, his nephew and others to the ground, and showered the area with hot embers, shrapnel and debris.

“The explosion was like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” Perez said. “This town is hurt really bad.”

Information was hard to come by in the hours after the blast, and entry into the town of about 2,800 people was slow-going as the roads were jammed with emergency vehicles rushing in to help. Texas Gov. Rick Perry said state officials were waiting for details about the extent of the damage.

“We are monitoring developments and gathering information as details continue to emerge about this incident,” Perry said in a statement. “We have also mobilized state resources to help local authorities. Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of West, and the first responders on the scene.”

Dozens of emergency vehicles amassed at the scene and hours after the blast, fires were still smoldering in the ruins of the plant and in several surrounding buildings. Aerial footage showed injured people being treated on the flood-lit football field that had been turned into a staging area for emergency responders.

Al Vanek, a West City Council member, said first-responders were treating victims at about half a dozen sites, and he saw several injured residents from the nursing home being treated at the community center.

“Tomorrow is going to be a very sad day,” Vanek said.

Glenn A. Robinson, the chief executive of Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center in Waco, said in an interview on CNN that his hospital had received 66 injured people for treatment, including 38 who were seriously hurt. He said the injuries included blast injuries, orthopedic injuries, large wounds and a lot of lacerations and cuts. The hospital has set up a hotline for families of the victims to get information, he said.

Robinson did not immediately return messages from The Associated Press.

Messages to Scott Clark, spokesman for Scott and White Hospital in Temple and Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center in Waco, were not returned Wednesday. A spokesman at Providence Health Center was not available for comment, a hospital operator said.

Debby Marak told the AP that when she finished teaching her religion class Wednesday night, she noticed a lot of smoke in the area across town near the plant. She said she drove over to see what was happening, and that when she got there, two boys came running toward her screaming that the authorities ordered everyone out because the plant was going to explode.

She said she had driven only about a block when the blast happened.

“It was like being in a tornado,” Marak, 58, said by phone. “Stuff was flying everywhere. It blew out my windshield.”

“It was like the whole earth shook.”

She called her husband and asked him to come get her. When they got to their home about 2 miles south of town, her husband told her what he’d seen: a huge fireball that rose like “a mushroom cloud.”

Lucy Nashed, a spokesman for Perry’s office, said personnel from several agencies were en route to West or already there, including the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality, the state’s emergency management department and an incident management team. Also responding is the state’s top urban search and rescue team, the state health department and mobile medical units.

American Red Cross crews from across Texas were also heading to the scene. Red Cross spokeswoman Anita Foster said the group was working with emergency management officials in West to find a safe shelter for residents displaced from their homes. She said teams from Austin to Dallas and elsewhere are being sent to the community north of Waco.

The explosion knocked out power to many area customers and could be heard and felt for miles around. Lydia Zimmerman told KWTX-TV that she, her husband and daughter were in their garden in Bynum, 13 miles from West, when they heard multiple blasts.

“It sounded like three bombs going off very close to us,” she said.

In 2001, an explosion at a chemical plant killed 31 people and injured more than 2,000 in Toulouse, France. The blast occurred in a hangar containing 300 tons of ammonium nitrate, which can be used for both fertilizer and explosives. The explosion came 10 days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S., and raised fears at the time it was linked. A 2006 report blamed the blast on negligence.

The explosion was caused by anhydrous ammonia

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‘This tragedy has most likely hit every family,’ Texas governor says

By Ernesto Londoño and David Brown, Published: April 18

WEST, Tex. — Rescue crews in this small town spent Thursday searching for victims in the smoldering ruins of a liquid fertilizer depot and dozens of destroyed homes after an explosion caused an unknown number of deaths and injured more than 160 people.

Authorities early in the day estimated that five to 15 people had been killed. But later, they declined to specify the number of people missing or dead.

A fire at the West Fertilizer Co. appears to have ruptured high-pressure storage tanks full of liquid ammonia, which caused the huge blast. Several firefighters were missing.

“Last night was truly a nightmare scenario in that community,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) said Thursday, adding, “This tragedy has most likely hit every family.”

West, with 2,800 residents, is a flat farming community 20 miles from Waco, just off an interstate highway, with a smattering of antique shops and locally owned diners. It plays up its Czech heritage, and like many rural towns, it has a demographic profile tilting to the elderly.

A day after the explosion, a large swath of the town was blocked to the public as emergency personnel continued to search for victims, picking through the rubble of collapsed homes and the flattened facility. The Red Cross set up a shelter at the town’s community center, which provided displaced families with basic supplies.

Officials said there was no indication the fire was anything other than an accident, but they said they were examining all possibilities.

“We are not ruling anything out,” said Waco Police Sgt. William Patrick Swanton, a police spokesman.

Mayor Tommy Muska said 50 to 60 homes within a five-block radius of the storage depot were heavily damaged. West Rest Haven Nursing Home was being evacuated at the time of the blast because of its closeness to the fire. Its residents were all brought to a safe location, the mayor said.

Muska, who is also a firefighter, told reporters that he was heading toward the fire when the thundering explosion occurred. “It blew my hat off,” he said, looking startled. “It blew the rearview mirror off my truck. It was a very powerful explosion.”

Authorities were struggling Thursday to get a clear sense of the damage in West, in part because the explosion disrupted power and cellphone service to parts of the area.

“We’re going house to house, business to business,” Swanton said at a news briefing. “I think we’re going to see fatalities increase.” The explosion, he said, “reached blocks, if not miles, in its devastating effect. There are homes leveled. There are businesses leveled.”

The explosion “was massive, just like Iraq, just like the Murrah Building in Oklahoma,” D.L. Wilson, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, told reporters, referring to the April 19, 1995, bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. The federal government’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the U.S. Chemical Safety Boar d, which investigates industrial disasters, were sending teams.

The cause of the fire is unknown. Courtney Adair, 20, a great-niece of the owner of the fertilizer distributor, said the family is in shock. “They don’t know what to think or what’s going to happen,” she said. She said the family can’t fathom that anyone would have set the blaze on purpose.

“Honestly, I think this was an accident,” she said.

Wendy Maler, 37, who lives 750 feet from the facility, said her husband, a volunteer firefighter, urged her and their children to evacuate as the fire started spreading. Barely five minutes after reaching her mother-in-law’s house down the road, the ground shook as a ball of fire shot into the sky.

“We just grabbed the kids and hit the ground,” she said.

Her 47-year-old husband, David, was injured fighting the fire. Their house was ruined — windows blown out, drywall crumbled, doors caved in.

“We were able to go into the house and get our wedding rings, but that was it,” she said.

Perry told reporters he was declaring McLennan County a disaster area. He said President Obama called him Thursday morning from Air Force One en route to Boston, where the president was headed to attend a prayer service for victims of Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings.

In a statement issued by the White House, Obama offered whatever federal assistance is needed “to make sure there are no unmet needs as search and rescue and response operations continue.” The president added that “our prayers go out to the people of West” and that “good, hard-working people have lost their lives.”

Anhydrous ammonia has been used as a fertilizer since the 1940s and accounts for roughly one-third of the fertilizer used in this country. It is injected into the ground in liquid form. White cylinders containing the compound are a common feature of the rural American landscape.

Anhydrous ammonia burns, although not easily. However, if a storage cylinder melts in a fire and releases its contents, which then burn, the result can be catastrophic. The hazards of ammonia-filled tanks are well-known to firefighters.

The federal government requires risk management plans — which outline how a facility reduces the chances of an accidental leak of extremely hazardous material and how it would respond to any hazardous release — for plants and facilities with significant amounts of dangerous chemicals.

West Fertilizer did not make anhydrous ammonia. It stored and sold it. There are about 6,000 distributors like it around the country, said Kathy Mathers, spokeswoman for the Fertilizer Institute, which represents the industry.

After an inspection in September 2011, the federal government fined the company $10,100 for safety violations that included offering for sale and transport anhydrous ammonia “while failing to develop and adhere to a security plan,” according to documents from the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

The company showed it had properly labeled its cargo trucks, according to the documents, and also provided a cover page and table of contents for “their new security plan,” although that plan is not listed. The government then reduced the penalty to $5,250.

The Environmental Protection Agency fined West Fertilizer Co. $2,300 in 2006 for having a deficient risk management plan, according to the agency.

The EPA “found a number of deficiencies” with the retail facility during its March 16, 2006, inspection, said EPA spokeswoman Alisha Johnson. They included a failure to update the plan, which was due two years earlier; a failure to address the hazards identified in the company’s safety review; poor employee training records; and the lack of a formal written maintenance program.

In the case of West Fertilizer, Johnson wrote in an e-mail, the facility fell under the requirement because “the quantity of ammonia on-site exceeds 10,000 lbs.” She added that the company “has not had a major accident in the last five-years.”

The same year that the EPA fined the facility, state regulators investigated and cited it after receiving complaints about its ammonia emissions, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

“Ammonia Smell very bad last night from Fertilizer Plant, lingered until after they went to bed,” reads the June 6, 2006, report.

A nearby elementary school was evacuated in February because of a fire at the plant, according to a memo that the local school superintendent, Marty Crawford, sent to staff and parents.

Crawford wrote that the 911 dispatcher “did not acknowledge” that the retail facility “was carrying out a controlled burn of pallets and brush” and that “the district has asked emergency service providers for advanced notification in the future when the plant decided to conduct a burn.”

The memo did not say how the school, which serves fourth- and fifth-graders, learned or confirmed that the facility had been carrying out a “coordinated burn.”

The explosion came on a grim anniversary for the Waco area. Twenty years ago this week, 76 members of the fringe Branch Davidians religious group were killed after setting fire to their building when federal agents attempted to serve a search warrant.

Brown reported from Washington. Darryl Fears, Juliet Eilperin, Julie Tate and Ann Gerhart in Washington contributed to this report. Cody Permenter, a reporter for the Texas Tribune, contributed from West, Tex.

Ammonia gas and ammonium nitrate caused the blast???

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By Ralph Vartabedian, Neela Banerjee and Ricardo Lopez, Los Angeles Times

April 18, 2013, 6:27 p.m.

The blast at a West, Texas, fertilizer plant on Wednesday night was so massive that investigators believe it probably involved a significant amount of ammonium nitrate, a chemical that some scientists say should be regulated as an explosive.

In a report filed with the Texas Department of State Health Services on Feb. 26, West Fertilizer Co. said that it had up to 270 tons of ammonium nitrate at its facility, along with up to 100,000 pounds of liquid ammonia. The exact amounts on hand at the plant are not yet known, officials said.

Pentagon explosives experts say that a detonation involving 270 tons of ammonium nitrate would be larger than almost any non-nuclear weapon possessed by the U.S.

Government officials close to the investigation are focusing on reports that a very large quantity of ammonium nitrate was being stored at the plant, which industry officials say was a blending and distribution operation that served local farmers. In its filings with state officials, the company acknowledged that it had a range of industrial chemicals that it said were "extremely hazardous."

The explosion occurred after a fire started at the facility. It flattened buildings several blocks away, reflecting the type of explosive force commonly associated with ammonium nitrate.

Company filings with federal regulators named Donald Adair as the owner of the plant. Adair and other company officials could not be reached Thursday.

In its dealings with Texas regulators, the company said any accident would not be large enough to cause an explosion. A risk management plan filed by the company in 2011 made no mention of ammonium nitrate being stored at the facility.

Five years earlier, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency fined the company $2,300 for not even having a risk management plan in place and for other problems, including poor employee training and lack of a formal maintenance plan.

Last year, the company agreed to pay a $5,250 fine to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration for storing ammonia in improperly marked tanks and for transporting the material without a security plan.

About 8 billion pounds of ammonium nitrate is produced annually in the U.S., with half going to the agriculture industry and the other half to the explosives industry.

The chemical was also used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. Attempts to tighten regulation of the material have been bogged down since the early 1990s.

A Pentagon explosives expert said that government testing of ammonium nitrate has proven its deadly potential. The chemical generates a slow-moving but very high-pressure blast that causes significant organ damage to humans.

The fertilizer industry has fought tighter controls on the material, arguing that it is not explosive in the concentrations sold in retail stores. Farmers use the material to blast stumps out of the ground.

But a series of tests in New Mexico demonstrated that even low-level concentrations of ammonium nitrate, common in fertilizer sold at home improvement stores, could generate serious explosions.

"It is a very significant explosive force," the military expert said.

Ammonium nitrate explosions have caused some of the worst industrial accidents in U.S. history, including a 1947 disaster in Texas City that killed more than 500 people and injured 5,000. Accidental explosions occur regularly around the world, including incidents that killed 37 in Mexico in 2007.

Neal Langerman, principal chemist with Advanced Chemical Safety, a San Diego industrial consulting firm, said the explosion did not necessarily involve ammonium nitrate. The initial fire at the plant could have caused a failure of the tanks containing ammonia gas, also known as anhydrous ammonia.

"If a tank containing a liquefied flammable gas is subjected to fire, that tank could fail catastrophically, releasing the gas, which will instantly ignite, causing a catastrophic explosion," he said.

The EPA and various state regulators are responsible for overseeing safety at the West Fertilizer plant. All facilities with hazardous substances on site must file a list of those substances with state and local authorities. A list filed by West Fertilizer on Feb. 26 showed that it had not only ammonium nitrate and anhydrous ammonia, but a variety of agriculture chemicals.

In its 2011 risk management plan, the company said that the anhydrous ammonia did not pose any threat of fire or explosion. "The worst-case release scenario would be the release of the total contents of a storage tank released as a gas over 10 minutes," the plan said.

The company did not have backup safety systems inside the facility, like auto shut-offs, alarms, or emergency air and power, according to the plan. It also did not have so-called mitigation systems, like sprinklers, fire walls and blast walls.

"Many people would be surprised to learn that there are no federal setback or buffer zone requirements to keep extremely hazardous chemicals away from nearby schools, homes, and businesses, and no evaluation requirements for companies to see if they can store lesser quantities or use safer chemicals," said Paul Orum, a Washington-based chemical safety consultant.

The disaster is being investigated by teams from five federal agencies, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others.

ralph.vartabedian@latimes.com

neela.banerjee@latimes.com

ricardo.lopez@latimes.com

Times staff writers Geoffrey Mohan and Scott J. Wilson in Los Angeles contributed to this report.