ATF Says West Explosion Deliberately Set

In an announcement last Wednesday, Robert Elder, Special Agent in Charge of the Houston Field Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, announced his agency's finding that the explosion of Apr. 17, 2013 of a fertilizer storage facility in West, Texas was a "criminal act."  The agency has offered a $50,000 reward to anyone having information that leads to the arrest and conviction of those responsible.  No other details of the investigation's findings were released, but ATF says it has done over 400 interviews leading up to their determination that somebody deliberately set the fire that led to the explosion.

This bit of news raises more questions than it answers, not all of them technical ones.  But we can ask some technical ones for starters.

The explosion itself was so violent that it showed up on seismometers hundreds of miles away, left a crater over 90 feet (27 meters) wide, and scattered debris and other evidence for miles around, besides killing 15 people and injuring about 160.  How anybody could find enough evidence to conclude it was a deliberate act of arson is a good question.  But the ATF people are apparently well experienced and equipped to do that.  Unless and until their evidence comes out in a criminal trial, it's not possible to comment on the quality or quantity of their research and investigations.  But their findings are consistent with the conclusions of the U. S. Chemical Safety Hazard and Investigation Board, which released its final report on the explosion in January of this year.  In it, the Board stated that one possible cause of the fire was that it was intentionally set, although there were other possibilities as well.

If the West explosion turns out to be deliberately set, that does not reduce the need for fertilizer plants to store ammonium nitrate more safely.  (Ammonium nitrate was the fertilizer material that detonated at West and caused so much damage.)  A representative of the Texas Ag Industries Association made the news in April of 2015 by saying that until a definite cause for the explosion could be identified, there was no need to issue new regulations for the storage of ammonium nitrate.  One hopes that now the ATF has apparently determined a definite cause, the Texas Ag Industries Association will reconsider its stance, even if it is nothing more than increasing security around existing fertilizer plants.

To those who lost loved ones or were injured or lost property in the explosion, the news that the fire was intentional can only cause more grief.  We can only speculate about the motives of the perpetrator, although an ATF spokesman has ruled out terrorism as a motive.  If the arsonist knew that the ammonium nitrate stored at the plant was likely to explode, the culpability in the case is compounded, but in any case, I hope that if the culprit is still around to be found, that justice can be served.  I say that in the unlikely event that the person who set the fire was also a first responder who was killed in the explosion.

Such a situation is not unheard of, as the case of John Leonard Orr shows.  Orr was a fire captain and arson investigator in Glendale, California in the 1980s.  Following a series of suspicious fires, in 1991 a fingerprint recovered from one of the fires was found to match Orr's, and he was tried and convicted on three counts of arson.  Partly because two children died in one of the fires Orr allegedly set, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

I also hope that the ATF's body of evidence will withstand scrutiny in a court of law.  With a special Maryland fire-investigation lab, the ATF is probably the cream of the fire-investigator crop in the U. S.  But not all fire investigations are equal, and there have been cases where people have been convicted of arson with evidence that was later shown to be shoddy and insubstantial, as a 2009 New Yorker article by David Grann called "Trial By Fire" described.  In that case, a man named Todd Willingham was convicted of arson in a Corsicana, Texas fire that claimed the lives of his three children.  After he was executed the arson evidence was re-examined by experts, one of whom said that the original investigation was more "characteristic of mystics or psychics" than of modern scientific methods. 

After all the time and effort spent on the West investigation, we can be fairly sure that the ATF would not conclude that the explosion resulted from a deliberate act unless they have strong and convincing evidence.  I'm sure the residents of West are eager to hear the details of the ATF's findings, which I hope will be released in due time.  But I'm sorry that after all the suffering those folks have had to go through, they now have to deal with the real possibility that someone, somewhere intended for the West explosion to happen.

Sources:  This news was reported in various sources, and in particular a Houston Chronicle article by  Mark Collette at http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/ATF-says-West-explosion-was-a-criminal-act-7462148.php to which I referred.  A video of the news conference at which Robert Elder announced the ATF's findings was posted by the Dallas Morning News at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJWa3tDEYL4.  The ATF's announcement of a reward in connection with the explosion can be found at https://www.atf.gov/news/pr/atf-announces-50000-reward-west-texas-fatality-fire.  I referred to the U. S. Chemical Safety Hazard and Investigation Board's final report on the explosion at http://www.csb.gov/assets/1/19/West_Fertilizer_FINAL_Report_for_website_0223161.pdf.  I also referred to the New Yorker website version of the article "Trial by Fire" at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/trial-by-fire and the Wikipedia articles on the West Fertilizer Company explosion and John Leonard Orr. 

OSHA Fine for West Explosion: What's the Point?

Last April 17, when the West Fertilizer Company's facility in the Texas town of the same name exploded, killing 15 and laying waste not only to the plant but to a good chunk of the town as well, it had been more than 25 years since a federal Occupational Safety and Health (OSHA) inspector personally appeared at the plant.  But that did not stop OSHA from issuing a $118,300 fine against the company last week, on October 9, for a list of 24 safety violations.  This news came out despite the federal government's shutdown because Sen. Barbara Boxer's office found out about it and notified news media.  The company has fifteen days to either pay the fine or file an administrative appeal with OSHA, and company representatives said they were conferring with lawyers about their next step.

Depending on how you view the idea of punishment, OSHA's fine either looks pretty silly or seems like a sound and reasonable step for such an agency to take.  Let's examine the case for silly first.

Suppose you run a small fertilizer company that has gone through bankruptcy in the last few years and probably has total assets, land and facilities included, of at most a few million dollars, with a one-million-dollar liability insurance policy on the property.  Due to causes that even combined federal and state investigations cannot precisely determine, your plant blows up, killing fifteen of your fellow citizens, causing over a hundred million dollars' worth of damage to your town, and by the way, completely demolishing the physical assets of your business.  Half a year later, along comes OSHA and lays a fine of over $100,000 on you for various historical violations based on testimony of how the fertilizer that exploded was stored and for not having an emergency response plan.  How do you respond?

I am not running the West Fertilizer Company, but at the moment, hiring lawyers to file an administrative appeal will be a lot cheaper than paying the fine up front, which would probably suck up most of any remaining cash and possibly make the company go out of business altogether.  Not that they haven't had time to do anything more than deal with lawyers and lawsuits since April anyway.  Obviously, the better time for OSHA to have levied such a fine would have been before the April explosion, when the changes possibly stimulated by such a large penalty might have had the positive effect of preventing the explosion. At this point, the fine brings to mind a scene in the animated film Wallace & Gromit:  The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.  At one point, the brilliant but silent canine character Gromit, a skilled driver, goes on a wild car chase that winds up with his vehicle stalled out after a minor collision.  Sitting there silently on a dark road, Gromit seems lost in the depths of despair, thinking that things cannot possibly get worse.  And then they do:  the car's airbag deploys in his face.  OSHA's fine is timed as well as Gromit's airbag.

Whether the fine makes any sense depends on one's theory of punishment.  In How to Think About the Great Ideas, philosopher Mortimer Adler points out that there are two main opposing theories of punishment:  retribution and prevention.  As retribution, OSHA's fine would be laughable, were it not for the somber circumstances.  It is hard to imagine a retributive penalty for the West Fertilizer Company, which after all is a business firm, not an individual.  It has already been reduced to smithereens, and unless you contemplate something primitive like blowing up the houses of the owners in retribution for the explosion of their plant, it is hard to conceive of a punishment that would be purely retributive in character. 

OSHA fines appear to be based on the preventive theory of punishment, as are most administrative fines levied on corporations in general.  While it is clear that it is way too late for this fine to prevent what happened in West, it is by no means too late for other operators of fertilizer manufacturing and storage facilities to take note of the fine and the reasons why it was levied.  There are over a dozen similar fertilizer plants just in Texas alone, and it is a good bet that many of these are lacking in the same safety features that would have prevented or mitigated the accident in West.  One hopes that insurance companies will take the initiative to motivate their fertilizer-plant customers to upgrade their facilities and procedures to make it less likely that something like the West explosion will happen.  And there is always the chance that enlightened managers and owners will take it upon themselves to make the needed changes:  following existing federal guidelines about how ammonium nitrate should be stored, putting emergency procedures in place and even practicing fire drills, and taking other sensible precautions that are not rocket science but often get neglected when an organization skids by for years and avoids the very unlikely but disastrous chance that a normally well-behaved chemical like ammonium nitrate will explode. 

While it's true that the horse named the West fertilizer explosion has long since left the barn, there are many other horses of a similar nature who can be kept in place if fertilizer plants and facilities across the country learn from the sad experience of the Texas town that got famous for a reason nobody wanted.  I hope that OSHA's actions, however tardy, serve as a warning to prevent another tragedy like the one we saw last spring.

Sources:  The OSHA fine was described in a news article in the Waco Tribune that appeared in the online edition of Oct. 11 at http://www.wacotrib.com/news/business/west-fertilizer-co-cited-for-safety-violations/article_6d83a0cc-f28f-5763-ba23-f8229c0dfbae.html.  Mortimer Adler's How to Think About the Great Ideas (Chicago:  Carus Publishing, 2000) describes the great idea of Punishment on pp. 274-283.

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).