Slashdot Mirror
Huge Explosion at Texas Fertilizer Plant
A massive explosion took place around 8:50pm ET at a fertilizer plant in a small town in Texas. The cause of the explosion is not precisely known, but the plant was on fire beforehand. The casualty reports are tentative and expected to rise, but two people are dead and over 150 are injured. Firefighters responding to the initial fire are unaccounted for. Over a thousand residents have been evacuated from their homes. Officials are worried about the volatility of another tank at the plant, but also about the potential damage from exposure to anhydrous ammonia. The blast was heard in Dallas, 75 miles away. "There are lots of houses that are leveled within a two-block radius. A lot of other homes are damaged as well outside that radius." A brief YouTube video shows the explosion of the plant.
It was detected by seismic networks. Note that the most common reason for "earthquakes" at zero depth is a quarry explosion, so that's how they initially labeled it. They've since changed it to read simply "Explosion". Click the "did you feel it link" and you can see that some people felt it as if it were an earthquake. Strangely, they are north of the event. Either the waves propogated that way, or people south of the event saw the cloud and realized it was an explosion not a quake.
Fertilizers are extremely dangerous and should be handled with more care. A similar thing happened in my town 12 years ago. If was on 21/9/2001, so 10 days after 11/9/2001 and therefore nobody heard about it but it left some 30 people dead and a city in ruins. Look up AZF in Toulouse on the web to see what I'm talking about. They first blamed it on the terrorists and later admitted it was an industrial accident. Like in Texas, the AZF factory was build out of the town but the town grown and it found itself in the middle of it. Poor urban planning.