News – full story

A HUGE explosion at a Texan fertiliser plant has levelled dozens of nearby buildings, injuring at least a hundred people with many others feared dead.

The blast occurred at around 20:00 local time last night in the town of West, close to the city of Waco.

According to the Waco police department, a blaze broke out at the West Fertilizer plant at around 18:00 local time. When fire-fighters arrived on the scene they realised that the chemicals stored on site could explode and began evacuating the area. Soon after, the plant detonated with enough force that it was picked up by US Geological Survey stations as equivalent to a magnitude 2.1 earthquake.

In a press conference, William Swanton of the Waco police department said that they expect there to be between five and 15 casualties, with several fire-fighters currently missing. He spoke of “extreme devastation” around the site, and added that ruined homes and businesses were still being searched and that a portion of the plant is still on fire, but is under control.

Though the exact cause of the blast is not yet known, IChemE Loss Prevention Panel member Ken Patterson tells tce that the size and violence of the explosion shown in videos captured by members of the public is in line with ammonium nitrate detonation, rather than a gaseous ammonia explosion.

“The reports I’ve seen speak of 20t of anhydrous ammonia on the site, which I would guess the use to make ammonium nitrate fertiliser,” he says. “My guess – and it’s an absolute guess – is that they had stacks of hundreds of tonnes of ammonium nitrate, and it was one or more of those that exploded.”

One of the most common fertilisers used, ammonium nitrate can explode violently when heated or ignited. Explosions at BASF’s Oppau plant in Germany 1921 and Texas City in the US in 1947 each killed several hundred people, and as recently as 2001 the Toulouse explosion in France killed 31.

 “Ammonium nitrate is pretty-much the most devastating industrial chemical used in Europe and North America,” says Patterson. “It’s been involved in the most devastating industrial explosions in Europe since the Second World War.

He adds, however, that: “Some 99.99% of the millions of tonnes handled every year are handled safely, and fertilise crops and give us much higher yields than we would otherwise get. But if treated improperly, it’s a very devastating explosive.”

The US Chemical Safety Board (CSB) – the independent federal agency charged with investigating industrial chemical accidents – has confirmed that it has already dispatched “a large investigation team” to the site of the accident. It has also reported that the blast destroyed a large number of buildings in the town.

According to the local WacoTrib newspaper, Swanton told reporters that there are “no indications that this is anything but an accidental fire,” but the police are still investigating.