The West, Texas disaster wasn't an industrial accident

by Doctor Science

Or at least, not *just* an industrial accident. I see three interlocking sets of problems in the disaster[1]:

1. An industrial or occupational mishap at the West Texas Fertilizer Co. Some combination of mishandling or mis-storage of chemicals, improper or non-existent safely protocols, sloppy recordkeeping, sloppy materials-handling. These are the kind of issues people talk about when they discuss workplace or industrial safety.
2. No-one at the company, in the community, or at their various insurance companies seems to have considered that maybe it wasn't too smart having the middle and high schools so close to a plant dealing in explosive chemicals. Look at the damage to the middle school: and think how lucky they were that the explosion didn't happen while there were children present. Killing most of the fire department was a disaster; if it had killed a bunch of children as well, it would have been a *catastrophe*.
3. It's part of the ongoing investigation, but I haven't seen any clear indications that the volunteer firefighters were aware that they were facing a chemical fire, or that they had the training and equipment to deal with one.

I'm working on a longer post about this disaster and about how we perceive and deal with risk, but I wanted to get this out first. It doesn't seem right to me to mostly talk about the West, Texas, deaths as workplace or occupational casualties, when very few (if any) of the deaths were of workers. It's not all that comparable to e.g. a mining disaster, because the death and destruction involves the community, not just the workplace.

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[1] National coverage of the Texas disaster has been spotty and superficial. I'm following The Dallas Morning News and The Waco Tribune-Herald for detailed, ongoing reporting.

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"The Smoking Fire", etching from Giovanni Battista Piranesi's series of imaginary prisons, mid-18th century.

Comments

[JeffnSon]

make that NOT responsible

[JeffnSon]

WARNING: I know very little, or to be honest I know nothing! All I have here for you is hearsay and I can't recall links to where I read that hearsay. Banks Environmental is not where I read that there were some homes in the neighborhood before the plant arrived. It said nothing about the schools. I resign at investigative reporting. Not my trade or calling.

But first here's one more piece of hearsay, the plant greatly expanded its inventory of ammonium nitrate fertilizer when all the other suppliers in the area went out of business after the crash of 2008.

[JeffnSon]

Really Bad things happen all the time and it is seldom the result of evil. It is almost always the result of ignorance.
Have no interest in digging to assign blame and then move on. Want to understand what went wrong and not do that again.

Perhaps willful ignorance should be labeled Criminal Stupidity and carry jail time, but where is the benefit in that. We'd need a big prison and this community has already been punished.

I'm not angry, I'm depressed.
My mind does not go to assigning blame it almost always goes to coulda-shouda.

In 1984 the area had been subdivided into a residential neighborhood, houses were being built and someone must have been thinking of schools. What encouraged Mr. Donald Adair to move his business there? Its former sitting a half mile south of Up in Smoke BBQ seems ideal to me (no need for fire detection alarms or other disaster prevention measures). He coulda-shoulda stayed where he was.

When the neighborhood and Adair's business grew and changed he coulda-shoulda moved back to that location and subdivided his prime real-estate next to all the schools into more residential lots.

OK going to coulda-shoulda is not helping me much. Need to move on and focus on stuff I can effect.