Ten Times as Many
Runners in Boston as Residents in West, Texas
Almost ten times as many people run in the Boston Marathon as live in West, Texas. The Boston event draws about half a million spectators to a city of 625,000, numbers that dwarf the Texas town that is home to little more than one one-hundredth of one per cent of the total Texas population of more than 26 million.
The explosion in West, Texas, was so powerful it blew out windows two miles away. People heard it for miles, and some felt it as much as a hundred miles away. It destroyed perhaps more than a third of the town, including a school (empty) and a retirement home (133 residents). Railroad tracks were destroyed some distance from the blast, which pushed the closer rail across the ties against the farther rail.
Some sense of the intensity and unexpectedness of the explosion is captured in [1]short cellphone videos[1], including one taken by a [2]father in his vehicle[2] with his daughter, watching as the West Fertilizer Co. burned. Then the blast overwhelms the camera, making the picture indecipherable even as the daughter clearly yell to her father, "Please get out of here! Please get out of here!"
Unlike an unpredictable and uncontrollable terrorist bomb, a fertilizer plant explosion is totally predictable and nearly controllable. Everyone knows fertilizers can be made into bombs. That was a fertilizer bomb that destroyed the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Fertilizer plants, like the one that burned in Bryan, Texas, in 2009, have been a well-known danger for almost a century.
West Fertilizer
Wasn't Much Regulated By Anyone
Known danger isn't necessarily a danger attended to, as [3]the Wall Street Journal[3] reports:
"The Texas
Commission on Environmental Quality said Thursday that the West Fertilizer Co.
facility that exploded Wednesday was built in 1962, before state and federal
requirements for toxic emissions were established. As a result, the facility
was grandfathered until state law required it to get a permit in 2004. The
company didn't acquire the permit until after a 2006 investigation by the
environmental agency found it in violation of the law.
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