how about the leveled town in texas?

seriously , the hell with the crazy guy , i refuse to feed his need for notority and am choosing to turn away from the crazy and focus on the one needing help.

This plant exploding hurts my heart, 60 still missing 12 confirmed dead. whole blocks leveled, how can we help?


http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/19/us/texas-explosion/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Scary part is this plant had been warned and fined in the past for insufficient safety.

Very sad.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobil...zer-co-epa_n_3110050.html?utm_hp_ref=business

Heard this on the radio on the way to work yesterday morning. So incredibly sad and they haven't ruled out criminal activity. Part of me hopes it was just a very unfortunate accident and not some other evil hearted person.

to think the blast was so strong it blew out windows 7 miles away and was heard 40 miles away.


I want to help but have no idea how? is there crowdfunding thingy for these people? does anyone know?

Very sad. I have been in West so many times. Very small Czech community and great food.

What the heck was going on there anyway? On at least a few news sites, I can't even find what they were making. Ammonium nitrate, or did the anhydrous ammonia go off on its own (which is possible, but very rare)?

How is it that after more than a day, they are still apparently only half way done searching homes? Who is running this search anyway?

Ugh this is just awful.

Those poor families.

laurelin , a Czech community huh ? Thats a crazy coincidence there.

I think an accident is pretty likely, but of course with everything else going on they are probably going to take an extra hard look. It is very sad. Immediately after it happened the estimated death toll was MASSIVELY higher than it has turned out to be... it is still horrible, but sounds like they were expecting casualties to be so much worse. And the fire was possibly going to be blown out of control and start spreading out of the city, mercifully it seems mother nature helped and that didn't happen.

My friend can't understand why they built nursing homes and schools so close to the plant. It is known that these chemicals are fragile and this is a high risk job... didn't one blow a few years ago too? I don't think it was in Texas but the story seems familiar. You would think they wouldn't want to build ANYTHING that close to it. =<

The Czech Republic is in Germany.
Chechnya (Boston suspects) is in Russia.

The news last night here said they weren't making anything, they were storing ammonium nitrate. Or something.

what i understand is they where holding and selling kind of fertilizer similar to the kind used in OKcity bombing. I am not to chemistry savvy , so I dont know the details of that.

I think there is a problem with leaking gas also hindering search efforts.

Huh? Czech Republic and Chechnya are two completely different places.

Thanks , I was confused and obvilously my geography skills need help!lol


saw that from beanie sass thanks for pointing it out also! I really do need to learn better geo skills.

Well, the Czech Republic isn't IN Germany, it's a sovereign country. It's bordered by Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Poland though. Chechnya is in lower Russia, above Turkey and between the Black and Caspian Seas.

just horrid. i dont see any links to redcross or any other giving site? has anyone else came across any?

Most the people that live in West have been here for a while (as in generations). There are lots of little communities in Texas where a group of Czech, German, etc immigrants settled and they like to hold on to at least a bit of that tradition. The older gens still often speak czech. The town is between college station and okc so we'd stop there for kolaches often. My dad introduced me to the kolaches there. Hillsboro is always a traffic cluster so I usually needed a break at about that point in the trip.

As far as I know it was fertilizer. It sounds like an accident to me and hopefully it was. Still very sad. It's not a very big town and it will be a huge impact on the town.

Do you know what they were warned for? I've seen those reports but not specifics. Really it could be anything from missing toerails on catwalks to tanks that are rusting through. Safety concerns is a broad range.

This.

But of course, what a coincidence that would have been

CNN reported on this:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/19/us/texas-explosion/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Yeah, I did see that but it doesn't really tell us anything, unfortunately.

Having worked in a solvent plant around rather explosive chemicals and working within the safety guidelines that go with such a workplace, I'm personally curious as to what happened. Doesn't lessen the tragedy in any way -- what a nightmare for everyone involved.