The Explosion at West: Who Regulates the Regulators?

When about 60 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer blew up last April 17, killing fifteen people and destroying $100 million worth of property in the town of West, Texas, a great many people were surprised about a lot of things.  I’m not sure how many citizens of West knew enough Texas history to recall the 1947 Texas City explosion that killed 581 people when two ships carrying ammonium nitrate exploded.  In testimony before the U. S. Senate this week, it was revealed that members of the West fire department were unaware of the potential hazards of the ammonium nitrate stored at the fertilizer plant where they were called to fight a fire shortly before the explosion occurred.  A chemical engineer at the same hearing stated that if the Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules regarding ammonium nitrate storage had been enforced at the plant, the explosion might not have happened.  The very fact of the hearings, though, is something that brings up a broader question of how laws and regulations concerning ammonium nitrate are made and enforced in the U. S. today.

Handling ammonium nitrate is a little like playing the lottery in reverse:  most of the time nothing happens, but once in a great while, you hit big.  If the fertilizer compound was as dangerous as plutonium, for example, there would be no question about imposing strict and rigid regulations on its handling and use.  But many thousands of tons of the product are used for both fertilizer and intentionally as explosives every year without incident.  What do you do about a product that is safe 99.999...% of the time, but every so often hauls off and makes the headlines with a major disaster?

This is fundamentally a problem of justice and prudence, two of the four cardinal virtues recognized by the medieval age (the other two are temperance and fortitude, in case you’re wondering). 

One way to deal with the problem would be for every private firm that handles ammonium nitrate to comply voluntarily with the technical recommendations of OSHA and other experts:  store ammonium nitrate far away from other chemicals and combustible materials, ensure that storage facilities have sprinkler systems to prevent fires, keep the stuff in non-combustible containers, and so on.  I have never run a fertilizer plant, so I can’t say how much more this would cost compared to the way things are done today.  But I suspect it would be more or less of a challenge for every plant handling ammonium nitrate to change its ways as described.  It would be the right thing to do, assuming the costs wouldn’t be so prohibitive as to bankrupt the outfit (and the West plant, it turns out, had gone through bankruptcy a few years earlier).  And maybe some plants and distributors are taking these actions already.  But probably not all of them will.

Another way to deal with the situation would be for us to hire enough government regulators, inspectors, and other bureaucrats to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again on U. S. soil.  This is where things get fuzzy with regard to how laws and regulations are made at the federal level. 

In principle, the United States is a government of, by, and for the people.  That should put “the people” at the top, as the ultimate authority over not only Congress (which is the branch of government most responsive to the people’s will, at least nominally), or over the President, but even the judiciary as well.  It is nothing new to say that this authority has had difficulty getting itself asserted in recent decades.  I would like to concentrate on one particular aspect of this problem:  the ever-growing presence of federal regulatory agencies and agents, and how they can be made more responsible to the public they are supposed to serve.

In a recent issue of the conservative journal National Review, columnist Rob Long points out that we now have a situation in which unchecked and largely unmonitored growth of federal bureaucracies is virtually guaranteed.  As federal-employee unions campaign for administrations and representatives who favor the indefinite increase of government bureaucracies, the number and power of unelected bureaucrats increases in an apparently never-ending spiral. 

This is not necessarily a bad thing, IF every dollar spent on a bureaucrat yields a true dollar’s worth of improvement in the health, safety, and general well-being of the commonwealth.  But who thinks that is the case?  And what mechanisms do we have in place for ensuring that bad and unproductive bureaucrats and bureaucracies are reigned in or eliminated?  From what I can tell, one of the main checks on bureaucratic power is hearings such as the one in the U. S. Senate last week.  If it goes as most such hearings go, members of Congress browbeat bureaucrats before the cameras for a day or two and then everyone goes back to business as usual, which for Congress means raising funds to be re-elected, and for bureaucrats means. . . well, it depends on the bureaucrat.

This is not to tar all government employees with the same brush.  Millions of them are hard-working, dedicated, and deliver the taxpayers’ money’s worth in the form of useful service.  But my quibble is with the absence of an efficient, effective, and swift way to feed back problems with governmental regulatory actions (or inactions) so that the bureaucracy responds and gets continually better.

In private enterprises under capitalism, the market is the main way that efficiency is rewarded and incompetence is punished.  But I am not calling for the privatization of government, necessarily.  I’m not really sure what the answer is. 

Possibly (and this is coming from an educator, so take it with a grain of salt) some type of civic and even moral education would help.  In a better world than the one we have,  the managers of the West fertilizer plant would have known enough, and spent enough, to store ammonium nitrate in a safer location.  The members of the fire department would have known enough to call for an emergency evacuation at the first sign of fire in the fertilizer plant’s ammonium nitrate storage area.  And any government regulators involved would have been local people, people who lived in the town they protected and knew the people whose lives they were concerned about.  They might have played roles in helping the firefighters and plant owners learn and change their ways.  But as for the way things are now and as far as the citizens of West were concerned last April 17, the billions of dollars spent in Washington over the years on OSHA, the EPA, and all the other alphabet-soup outfits with a remote connection to this tragedy were wasted.

Sources:  I used material from a “mystatesman.com” subscriber-only site maintained by the Austin American Statesman, namely an article by Brenda Bell posted on June 27, 2013 at http://www.epa.gov/osweroe1/docs/chem/ammonitr.pdf.  I also consulted Wikipedia’s articles on the Texas City disaster and the cardinal virtues.  Rob Long’s article “Bureaucratic Rot,” which may contain more information about fish guts than you care to read, appeared on pp. 21-22 of the July 1, 2013 issue of  National Review.

The Disaster in West

Anyone who drives along Interstate 35 in Texas between Waco and Dallas or Fort Worth will pass through West, a small rural Texas town with a Czech heritage that was known, at least until last week, mainly for the pastries that you can buy at a bakery right next to the Interstate.  It would not have surprised me to learn that a distributor of fertilizers to local farmers operated on the east edge of town, nor that one of the kinds of fertilizer sold by the dealer was ammonium nitrate.  But when I learned of the tremendous explosion that killed at least 14 people, injured hundreds, and destroyed a good fraction of West’s built environment last Wednesday evening, April 17, my sadness was tinged with the knowledge that in warehousing large quantities of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, the firm was taking a chance that such a thing could happen.

Ammonium nitrate is a curious chemical.  A “molecule” consists of an ammonium ion (four hydrogens arranged around a nitrogen) with a positive charge and a nitrate ion (a nitrogen atom surrounded by three oxygen atoms) with a negative charge.  At room temperature, it is a solid, but its constituent elements are all gases.  And the only thing holding it together are the opposite charges retained by the ammonium and nitrate ions.  When heated gently in an open container, it breaks down into nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and water.  But when it is in contact with easily oxidized materials, such as the fertilizer urea or even some metals, heating can cause it to release oxygen, which greatly increases the heat of the reaction and can lead to a fire.  When confined by walls or even the pressure of a high stack of the material itself, burning ammonium nitrate can self-detonate.  A detonation is an explosive shock wave that travels at very high speed through a volume of material, and differs from burning as traveling by jet aircraft differs from walking.  This is apparently what happened a little after seven in the evening at the burning warehouse in West.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation of the power of the resulting blast can be done by beginning with an aerial view of the fertilizer plant before the explosion, which is still available on Google Maps.  Comparison with views of the devastated explosion site indicate that the explosion was probably centered in a large, flat warehouse building that appeared to be one story high and measured about 60 feet by 110 feet.  If we assume it was packed to a height of eight feet with ammonium nitrate (not an unreasonable assumption as distributors stock up for the summer growing season), the total mass of chemical in that building could have been as much as two thousand tons.  Pure ammonium nitrate has about a fourth of the energy content per pound as TNT.  Still, given these rough assumptions, if the whole mass went off at once, which it appears to have done, the force of the explosion could have been as great as a thousand tons of TNT, or one kiloton.

You may have run across the word “kiloton” in reference to nuclear explosions.  While there were fortunately no nuclear weapons or radioactive materials involved in the West explosion, the nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II had a yield of only about 16 kilotons of TNT.  So what happened in West was one-sixteenth of a small nuclear bomb, in terms of destructive power.  No wonder it showed up on seismographs as a magnitude-2 earthquake.

If ammonium nitrate is so dangerous, why isn’t handling and use of it more regulated?  That’s a good question.  The Wikipedia article on ammonium nitrate notes that in 2005, Australia passed a Dangerous Goods Regulation law which requires a license for the sale or use of the material.  But if even licensed users store huge quantities of the stuff in places where it can catch fire and explode, licensing would not prevent disasters such as the one that happened to West last week, or Texas City in 1947, or over twenty other occasions since 1916 listed in a separate Wikipedia article devoted to ammonium nitrate disasters. 

Chemical companies that deal routinely with explosives know how to handle these materials so that when they explode, the explosions are limited to a small area that is sacrificed in order to protect the rest of the property and lives involved.  You simply restrict the amount of explosive allowed in one place to a maximum amount that you can afford to blow up, and then physically isolate it from all other concentrations of explosive in a series of small bunkers.  If the fertilizer stored in the West Fertilizer Company plant had been dispersed in this way, perhaps one of the small storage areas might have blown up, but with sufficient earth-berm isolation and other precautions, the explosion would not have spread.

That is small comfort for the survivors in West.  And as a practical matter, you can handle ammonium nitrate in an ordinary way without special precautions, as it is done thousands of times each year around the world, and most of the time, nothing bad will happen.  If the West firm had been required to invest in the additional storage facilities needed to treat ammonium nitrate as a true explosive, it would have gone out of business for sure.  (News reports indicate the firm nearly went bankrupt a few years ago and was rescued at the last minute by the present owner.)  So we face the dilemma of either requiring a huge investment in safety facilities on the part of fertilizer manufacturers and retailers everywhere to prevent disasters like West, or we leave things as they are and wait for the next one.

A compromise solution might be the rigorous training of anyone who deals with ammonium nitrate, enforced by a licensing law similar to the one on Australia.  This would include mandatory evacuations based on scientific calculations of a worst-case explosion whenever a fire occurs near large quantities of the stuff.  While regulations like this would not have prevented the damage caused by the West detonation, it could have reduced the death toll. 

Our thoughts and prayers are with the residents of West, whose tragic experience may lead to changes that at least mitigate the dangers involved in dealing with ammonium nitrate in the future.  

Sources:  I referred to the Wikipedia articles “Energy density,” “Ammonium nitrate” and “Ammonium nitrate disasters” as well as Google maps of the vicinity and photographs in various publications of the disaster site, and the book The Science of High Explosives by Melvin A. Cook (Reinhold, 1958).