West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion

http://abcnews.go.com/m/blogEntry?id=18984400

Incredible video from a man and his daughter who are way too close to the action http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ROrpKx3aIjA

Didn't pay attention to the news release earlier this evening. My gosh that explosion was massive, prolly does not bode well for plant personnel. prayers for all

It's wiped out quite a bit of the town. There were some apartments not too far from the plant that look like a war zone now. They did shield a nursing home somewhat, but the nursing home still collapsed.

I'm following the story mostly on the Texas A&M forum, www.TexAgs.com on this thread here http://mobile.texags.com/Forums/12/Topics/2298764?page=1. It's ten pages right now, but there are lots of incredible pictures, and lots of people familiar with the area, and of course, lots of engineers to explain things.

Before:

After:

View Larger Map

wow. cause?

On the TexAgs board, there was talk of a news report where one of the school principals was complaining about the fertilizer plant burning pallets earlier in the day. Fire got out of control, maybe? Winds have been quite high in Texas lately.

Wow, that's bad. I work at a fertilizer plant.

Just heard about this a few minutes ago on the radio.

I thought somebody was barbecuing.

Seriously though, that's horrible. When watching the video all I could think was, "Dude, you are WAY too close to that fire." And then it exploded.

Fink, Do you post much on texags? that's been my main internet home for way to long, (until I found this place, now I'm always over here) I'm tony over there.

This picture shows the relationship between the filming location of the YouTube video and the apartment complex in my previous post.

In reply to icaneat50eggs: Long enough to reach Legend status!

wow, I've been around since before the server got reset in 99, but I'm only legendary in my own mind.

Now i have to remember which auto forum guy has the race miata.

I've read between 7 and 9 firefighters were killed with some still unaccounted for.

JoeyM wrote: wow. cause?

It's a fertilizer plant? They tend to go boom.

Good lord, that dad was way to close, what a moron. I hope his daughters/kids are ok.

I used to work as a contractor fixing steam/water/chemical/whatever leaks on-stream (still running and leaking). We went into many starch plants and the dust flying around always made me nervous about explosions.

Fertilizer is bad, bad stuff.

Damn. I hope they were able to evacuate everyone before the explosion.

My dad lives over in Roby, thankfully just over 230 miles away. The first thing I did was check how close he was to the blast.

Once there is an initial fire, people seem to be drawn closer.

Always expect a secondary event.

If I saw this when pulling into a Sonic drivethru, I would assume North Korea just dropped a nuke on us.

In reply to Sky_Render:

I suspect a North Korean attack will look a lot more like this:

Sky_Render wrote: If I saw this when pulling into a Sonic drivethru, I would assume North Korea just dropped a nuke on us.

And then within moments it would look like this.....

1988RedT2 wrote: In reply to Sky_Render: I suspect a North Korean attack will look a lot more like this:

No like this

OR this.