Remember Texas City

At 9:12 AM on April 16, 1947, a seismologist in Denver, Colorado noted an unusual vibration on his seismograph.  Calculations showed that it originated on the Texas Gulf Coast, when some 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer on a ship docked at Texas City, Texas exploded in milliseconds.  The resulting blast killed at least 581 people, injured thousands more, destroyed a number of chemical plants and refineries in the vicinity, and became the largest industrial accident in the history of the United States. 

 

Today, every town of any size has an emergency management plan, and regular drills are practiced for various kinds of accidents and crises:  floods, fires, storms, and so on.  Chemicals that can explode spontaneously are labeled as such, and extensive regulations prescribe how they must be safely stored, handled, and transported.  But in 1947, all these practices lay in the future as the industrial might of the U. S. was turned from making war materiel to assisting Europe in recovering from World War II. 

 

One critical component of many munitions was ammonium nitrate, a chemical which is both a blessing and a curse.  The blessing is that it dissolves easily in water and provides more nitrogen per pound than almost any other kind of fertilizer.  The curse is that it is highly unstable.  When detonated with a suitable blasting cap or other primer, it violently decomposes with a shock-wave detonation into nitrogen, oxygen, and steam—all gases that expand with tremendous force.  And when confined in large volumes, as on board the French freighter SS Grandcamp, an ammonium-nitrate fire stands a good chance of spontaneously detonating.  As described in exacting and vivid detail by biographer of George W. Bush Bill Minutaglio in his excellent City on Fire, that is exactly what happened after a fire of unknown origin was detected earlier in the day on the clear spring morning of April 16, as the ship was being loaded with fertilizer bound for Europe.

 

Minutaglio's extensive research for the book provides intimate and fascinating details about the lives of dozens of players in the disaster, ranging from sailors aboard the Grandcamp to the volunteer fire department's chief, the mayor, and leaders of the privately-owned port authority which was in charge of loading the ship from railroad cars at the port.  I would like to focus on the two safety practices which were glaringly absent that day:  labeling of potentially explosive chemicals and the practice of making emergency-management plans.

 

As was brought out in detail during a decade-long series of lawsuits following the disaster which established the precedent of class-action lawsuits against the Federal government, the fertilizer bags carried no hint that ammonium nitrate could be explosive under some conditions.  This is despite the fact that the same Midwestern factories that made the fertilizer for peaceful purposes had only a few short years ago been making the same stuff for munitions.  One or two chemical engineers or others with a technical background in Texas City knew of the explosive tendencies of ammonium nitrate.  But no members of the volunteer fire department—all but one of whom died in the explosion—knew about the dangers.  No one on the ship knew, especially the captain, who in a misguided attempt to salvage the cargo, sealed the hold and ordered live steam injected into it.  And none of the ordinary workers and citizens of Texas City knew that if anything went wrong, there was enough explosive on board the Grandcamp to destroy most of the town.  And it did.

 

The Grandcamp explosion was only the beginning of a disaster that went out of control well into the night.  Flying blazing debris ignited and destroyed most of a Monsanto chemical plant only a few hundred yards away from the dock, and broke loose a second fertilizer ship, the High Flyer, which eventually caught fire after it drifted across the port channel and collided with another ship.  The High Flyer exploded early the next morning and produced a bigger blast than the Grandcamp.  The only reason more fatalities didn't result from it was that nearly everyone who could get out of town by then had done so. 

 

Texas City's mayor, Curtis Trahan, survived the blast because he was at the city's equipment barns at the time, several blocks away.  While he did his best to coordinate rescue and medical efforts after the disaster, it was an exercise in making it up as he and his surviving citizens went along.  Eventually, as the magnitude of the disaster became known, Trahan received offers of assistance from the White House on down.  But coordinating and organizing the rescue and medical evacuation and treatment efforts amid the terrible damage, fires, and continuing explosions of oil refineries and chemical plants proved to be an almost insurmountable undertaking.  Instead, Trahan spent much of his time organizing the collection and identification of bodies where possible, although hundreds of missing people were never identified.

 

The terrible lessons taught by the Texas City disaster include the need to label all potentially explosive chemicals as such; the need to regulate the transportation and storage of such materials in a way that prevents explosions in case of fire; and the need to educate first responders and plan for various likely and not-so-likely scenarios when dealing with emergencies under the aegis of emergency management plans. 

 

Sadly, these lessons were not applied decades later in a similar disaster that struck West, Texas, a small town between Waco and the Dallas-Fort Worth area.  On April 17, 2013, a fire in an ammonium nitrate storage area of the West Fertilizer company attracted the attention of the volunteer fire department.  At 7:50 that evening, it exploded, killing 15 people and injuring at least 200, and destroying or damaging numerous structures.  On a smaller scale, the Texas City disaster repeated itself in West, where better storage practices and knowledge could have prevented or at least minimized the number of casualties.

 

Every day when ammonium nitrate is safely handled without incident is a good day.  We should be both thankful and mindful of the lessons learned at such cost, that have taught us the best practices of handling dangerous materials.  And anyone who reads Minutaglio's moving and dramatic account of the Texas City disaster will never forget those lessons.

 

Sources:  Bill Minutaglio's City on Fire:  The Forgotten Disaster That Devastated a Town and Ignited a Landmark Legal Battle was published in 2003 by HarperCollins.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles "West Fertilizer Company explosion," "Texas City disaster," and "Ammonium nitrate."

 

Sad Lessons from Beirut Ammonium Nitrate Explosion

 

On Tuesday, August 4, a warehouse in the crowded downtown port area of Beirut, Lebanon caught fire.  Lebanon has been going through hard times lately:  COVID-19, hyperinflation, and general government dysfunction.  Ordinarily,  a warehouse fire would not be cause for concern.  But this fire was different, because 2,750 tons of explosive ammonium nitrate was stored in the warehouse as a result of a combination of business misjudgment, bureaucratic incompetence, and negligence.

 

There are YouTube videos that show what happened next.  In one mobile-phone clip shot from a few miles away, an orange-colored smoke cloud towers above the downtown area.  Suddenly a black ball with cracks of yellow balloons outward at unbelievable speed, followed by a larger whitish spray of water that covers many city blocks.  And then the shockwave hits and the phone is apparenly knocked out of the witness's hand.

 

By the latest counting available at this writing (Sunday), at least 157 people were killed, over 5,000 were injured, and up to 300,000 people have been rendered homeless by the blast, which leveled almost all the buildings in the immediate vicinity and broke windows for a radius of many kilometers. 

 

How did that much ammonium nitrate end up in the middle of the capital city of Lebanon?  By a series of mishaps and oversights that, taken individually, were fairly minor.  But the end effect was disastrous.

 

A BBC article has straightened out the tangled tale.  In September of 2013, the Moldovan-flagged cargo ship MV Rhosus set sail from Batumi, a city on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, to deliver ammonium nitrate to an explosives factory in Mozambique.  After traveling through the Bosporous Strait and docking in Greece for about a month, the ship headed across the Mediterranean for the Suez Canal, which would take it to the eastern coast of Africa.

           

But somewhere in the Mediterranean, something went wrong.  One source said that the ship had "technical problems," but the Russian captain, a Mr. Prokoshev, said that the ship's owner had a cash shortfall, so in order to get enough money to pay for the Suez Canal passage fee, he ordered the captain to pick up a load of heavy machinery in Beirut.  In any event, the MV Rhosus ended up docking unexpectedly in Beirut in November of 2013.  According to the captain, the machinery was too heavy to load, and the owner didn't have enough money to pay the Beirut port fees and a fine.  This is why the Lebanese port authorities impounded the ship and its cargo.

 

To make matters worse, when presented with this situation, the owners of the ship and its cargo abandoned it to creditors and the port authorities, leaving them with 2,750 tons of dangerous ammonium nitrate and a crew that began running low on food and supplies.

 

Beirut has an official called the Judge of Urgent Matters, and when the crew petitioned this entity for permission to leave the ship and go back to their various homes, the judge eventually relented.  In early 2014, port authorities transferred the bagged ammonium nitrate from the abandoned ship to a warehouse near a grain elevator in the port to await "auctioning and/or proper disposal." 

 

No actual crime had been committed, but by a series of messups, the Port of Beirut became the unwilling owner of a warehouse full of ammonium nitrate.

 

Lower-level officials seemed to know the tremendous hazard that this stuff presented, and the BBC discovered messages from customs officials pleading with the Judge of Urgent Matters to do something about the confiscated explosives.  It appears they tried to get action at least six times in the next three years.  One can question the appropriateness of the judge's title by the fact that the stuff sat there all the way from 2014 until last Tuesday.  Reportedly, the Public Works MInister Michel Najjar was talking about the stuff with the port manager as recently as late July, but again, nothing was done.

 

Up until the 1970s, Lebanon was one of the more competently run countries in the Middle East.  But things have deteriorated since then, and the explosion last week was the end product of a bureaucratic failure of historic proportions.

 

As the ship's captain commented to an interviewer, the best thing that could have happened is if the port had paid the ship's owner to take the ship and its cargo away as soon as they could.  It would have cost maybe $200,000, but the port authorities would have been spared having to deal with the hot potato of that much ammonium nitrate.

 

That didn't happen.  What the situation needed was a person with both the authority and the courage to get rid of the ammonium nitrate, which could have been sold or even donated as fertilizer, which is its other common use besides that of an explosive.  But that would have gone against what may be an all-too-common tendency in some government organizations, which is to deal with the apparently urgent over the truly important but not apparently urgent matters at hand.

 

One important function of governments is to act as a kind of social immune system, defending the body politic from potential and actual threats that are constantly attacking it.  Beirut's political immune system has been weakened by strife, the war in Syria, economic dislocations, and other factors to the point that a very basic "immune response" of getting what amounted to a time bomb out of the city center failed.  We hope that the citizens of Beirut and Lebanon will now stand a better chance of getting what they've been asking for for years:  more competence in government.  But governments everywhere, even the U. S., can learn from this tragedy that incompetence can have a heavy price.

 

Sources:  The BBC report on how the ammonium nitrate got to Beiruit is at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53683082.  I also referred to a report by the Indian Express at https://indianexpress.com/article/world/lebanon-beirut-explosion-death-toll-france-germany-port-6542835/ and Wikipedia articles on Beirut and Lebanon.

West's Unsatisfying Legacy

When some half-million pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer exploded in the small Texas town of West on Apr. 17, 2013, it not only killed fifteen first responders and other people, injured 160, and damaged or destroyed dozens of buildings.  It showed what can happen when critical information about explosive-material storage is not shared with local authorities.  The West fire department did not know what they were dealing with, and if they had, many or all of the fatalities could have been averted.

Largely as a result of this accident, in the last days of the Obama administration the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued what became known as its "Chemical Disaster Rule."  According to a recent report in the Texas Tribune, this rule required that companies storing large quantities of potentially explosive chemicals make the fact known to local first responders and the public, and called for companies to make specific emergency plans and conduct meetings on a regular basis about emergency planning.

The rule was delayed until President Trump took office, and now the EPA is saying it's going to roll back many of its provisions.  After the rule was proposed, affected industries complained about it loudly, and so the modified rule eliminates the requirement for public access to information on dangerous chemical inventories.  Corporations claimed, with some justification, that making their inventory quantities public is an invasion of privacy, and could lead to increased threats by terrorist groups wanting to target locations where large quantities of explosive materials are kept.

One reason that news reports mentioned for the rollback was the finding of the accident's cause by the U. S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), which was made public to a limited extent in May of 2016.  The ATF concluded that the accident was caused by arson, but the way they concluded that is curious, to say the least. 

According to a 2017 Houston Chronicle article, the agency reportedly spent about $2 million on the investigation and interviewed hundreds of witnesses .  In this way, the ATF says it systematically eliminated any natural and accidental fire scenarios.  Having eliminated all natural and accidental causes, the agency's conclusion was that the fire was deliberately set by a person or persons unknown.  However, there is not a smidgen of direct evidence that indicates the fire was actually arson.

In science, there is an adage that goes, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."  Logically speaking, the ATF is justified in concluding that arson was the cause if and only if they have actually eliminated absolutely every other conceivable possible cause of the fire.  For example, I suspect they did not consider any possible supernatural causes, as those are outside the purview of modern science.  However, since a supernatural cause is still a cause, it counts in the list of other causes they should have considered and actively eliminated, and they didn't.

Apparently, this sort of thing is so common in arson investigations it has a nice Latin legal name:  "negative corpus."  Meaning, I suppose, the body wasn't there, so you can draw some conclusions from its absence.  The Chronicle article says that negative corpus findings are no longer recommended by standards published by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) adopted in 2011.  But local and even federal arson investigators still use it.

The convenient thing about the conclusion that arson was at fault is that it absolves the facility operator from a large burden of responsibility.  It's one thing if your own faulty practices cause an accident, but legally it's quite a different thing if somebody sneaks in and sets your place on fire deliberately. 

To be fair, I would not have the slightest clue of how to investigate an explosion so violent that it left a large crater where the plant used to be and scattered it over a good part of a square mile.  It's quite possible that some tiny critical piece of evidence—a frayed extension cord, for example—would be entirely obliterated in the blast, making a successful investigation of the cause impossible.  But I would also not want to spend two million dollars on an investigation and end up saying, "We dunno." 

The West explosion revealed serious deficiencies in how ammonium nitrate and other explosive materials are stored and how such information is shared, or not shared.  Although I do not have direct access to the revised EPA rule, I can only hope by reading between the lines of the summaries that it still has some provision for informing local first responders about the presence of dangerous chemicals.  That was the most harmful missing factor in what led up to the tragedy at West. 

And as the NFPA now recommends, investigators should be able to say, "Look, we tried, but there's just no way to figure out what caused this," instead of defaulting to a spurious conclusion of arson simply because it's legally convenient and lets companies off the hook.  While arson is also one of the logical possibilities, it shouldn't be shoved to the front of the line simply because it alleviates liability problems.

The town of West was forever changed by the explosion in 2013, and I expressed the hope at the time that something good would come of the tragedy in the form of tightened regulation of facilities that were potential bombs, such as the West Fertilizer Company plant.  It's entirely possible that the original EPA regulations were excessively burdensome to companies that are already doing more or less what they should do because their private insurers keep them in line.  But I hope the newly revised regulations still make sure that the local first responders, whose lives will be on the line if anything goes wrong, at least have the information they need to take suitable precautions for their own safety and the safety of others.

Sources:   I referred to articles in the Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2019/11/21/west-texas-fertilizer-explosion-spurred-safety-rules-trump-rescinding/ and https://www.texastribune.org/2016/05/11/west-fertilizer-plant-explosion-was-intentional-of/, and in the Houston Chronicle at https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Experts-cast-doubt-on-ATF-s-arson-finding-in-West-11725989.php, as well as the Wikipedia article on the West Fertilizer Company explosion.

Time To Make Airbags Optional?

For at least a couple of years, we have known that certain airbag inflators made by the Japanese firm Takata have been exploding like small bombs, sending shrapnel into drivers and passengers who otherwise would almost certainly have survived the collisions that set off the airbags.  A recent investigative article published in the New York Times says that at least fourteen people have died as a result of exploding airbags.  There's no good way to die, but getting killed by a defective safety device has to be one of the worst.  And especially if the company making the things was doing a coverup to keep selling them, as the Times reports.

The coverup was revealed in testimony taken as part of a lawsuit filed by Honda against Takata.  The active chemical in many Takata inflators is ammonium nitrate (AN), the same stuff that was responsible for the explosion in West, Texas in 2013.  One of the main attractions of AN is that it's cheap, which is one reason that Takata has historically been so successful in beating out competitive inflator companies.  But AN easily absorbs water and can undergo changes when subjected to heat or humidity that make it much more likely to detonate when ignited.  There's a difference between fast controlled burning, which is what an inflator is supposed to do, and detonation, which is a practically instantaneous explosion that will shatter almost any container.  And preventing AN from detonating involves keeping all moisture away from it for as long as it's in the car, which can be many years. 

Accordingly, automakers buying Takata inflators insisted that the company do very sensitive leak tests of its containers.  These tests involved injecting a certain amount of helium gas into a container before sealing it, and then putting the whole thing in a vacuum chamber attached to a helium mass spectrometer that can detect only a few molecules of helium, which ordinarily is not present in sea-level air.  It's a great system when it's not abused.  But the only problem was that the containers being tested at Takata's plant in LaGrange, Georgia, kept flunking. 

So the engineers decided to fudge the results.  They pumped down the vacuum chamber several times, "testing" the same container repeatedly until it ran out of helium.  Then they checked it off as passing, put new bar codes on it to conceal what they'd done, and reported that the container passed.  One engineer involved in this scheme complained to his manager about the deception, and was told "not to come back to any more meetings."  He subsequently quit the company.

Up till now, it looked like the worst that Takata was guilty of was gross incompetence, but now there is evidence of outright fraud. 

When I blogged about this matter in 2014, I fully disclosed that both of the cars my wife and I drive are affected by the airbag recall.  We are certainly not alone.  It now looks like over sixty million of the suspect inflators are out there somewhere, and at least nine separate carmakers are struggling to manage the most massive and nightmarish recall in automotive history.  Right now I am waiting to hear from our local Honda dealer about a recall notice we received for our Element last July, telling us that the passenger-side inflator was suspect and we should get it replaced.  Only, they didn't have replacement parts yet, so in the meantime, try not to let anybody sit there.  Now and then I still live dangerously and sit in the passenger seat anyway.  I can only imagine what this has done to the resale value of the vehicle.  So we'll hang onto it until Honda gets a replacement inflator for it.  But I'm not exactly happy to learn from the Times article that the replacement inflator may use ammonium nitrate too.

This whole sad situation brings up a question that was supposedly settled back in the 1990s, when airbags became mandatory on new cars in the U. S.  Can we afford the incremental added protection airbags provide in the light of the hassle, and now hazards, they involve? 

In a calculation performed back in 2005, a writer at the libertarian website Freakonomics claimed that he'd figured out how much it costs to save a life with a seatbelt versus an airbag.  I don't know the details of his calculations, but the results are astonishing.  Seatbelts are pretty cost-effective as safety devices go.  It's about $30,000 to save a life with a seatbelt.  Airbags?  Not so much.  They are vastly more complicated and are effective mainly in head-on collisions.  So the cost to save a life with an airbag is—fasten your seatbelt—$1.8 million.  Now this fellow said that $1.8 million still isn't bad by regulatory standards.  If it was my life saved by an airbag, I would be glad that somebody, somewhere spent that $1.8 million.  But that calculation was done before the massive airbag recall happened, and so you would have to add on to that figure however many millions of dollars have been spent by the automakers on the recall, not to mention the time, anxiety, and waste associated with such recalls.  And the isolated but not negligible accidents involving deaths or injuries directly attributable to airbags.  I've heard that some people have simply stopped driving cars with defective airbags.  This is a little extreme, but if you have another car you can use, I can understand.

It has always seemed a little dubious to me to install shock-triggered explosive charges in cars, even if they are proved to be a lifesaving measure.  And now we have even more reason to wonder whether it might not be a bad idea to make airbag use optional.  Because even properly working airbags can be hazardous to small children, I believe some cars were equipped to turn off airbags if the weight of a child was detected on the corresponding seat.  The way things are now, if I knew how to disable the airbags in my cars, I'd do it, but they're so complicated nowadays I'd have to go to half a year of technician school and even then I'd probably end up setting the thing off when I tried to disconnect it.  You shouldn't have to be qualified as a bomb disarmer to work on your own car, but that's the way it is these days.

In the meantime, let's hope that whoever is making the replacement airbag inflators does a really good job this time, and the millions of car owners around the world driving around with potential bombs can get rid of them.  But maybe it's time to reconsider the whole question of whether using airbags is something that a government should order you to do, or something that is best left to the decision of the consumer.

Sources:  The article "A Cheaper Airbag, and Takata's Road to a Deadly Crisis" by Hiroko Tabuchi appeared in the Aug. 26, 2016 online edition of the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/business/takata-airbag-recall-crisis.html.  I also referred to a useful website where updates on the crisis over the last two years have been collected, at http://blog.caranddriver.com/massive-takata-airbag-recall-everything-you-need-to-know-including-full-list-of-affected-vehicles/.  The Freakonomics piece appeared at http://freakonomics.com/2005/07/18/which-would-you-rather-have-a-seat-belt-or-an-air-bag/, and my previous blog on this subject appeared on Oct. 27, 2014 at http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2014/10/do-not-sit-here-exploding-airbag-recall.html.

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. 

West Two Years Later: The Cause Above Everything

Today, impossible heroes and implausible villains are to be found mainly in video games, but back in the 1930s, one of the largest-selling series of adventure books for boys was based around a young inventor character named Tom Swift.  Great literature it was not, but there was plenty of action, the good guys were always good, and the bad guys were really bad, although sometimes it was hard to tell what they were being bad about.  I particularly remember the closing scene of one book in which, after Tom foils a complicated attempt by an evildoer to wreak havoc on an entire city, the bad guy is led away in handcuffs muttering, "The Cause!  The Cause above everything!"  The reader was left in the dark as to what the Cause was, but it didn't matter—it was merely a placeholder, an unnamed motivation so that the bad guy could move the plot along.

In Texas, fiction sometimes becomes reality more than we'd like it to.  For example, who would have the nerve to write a book in which the president of the Texas Ag Industries Association would be named—I kid you not—Donnie Dippel?  But that's his name.  It's right here in the paper, the Austin American-Statesman for Friday, April 17, a date which marked the two-year anniversary of the ammonium nitrate fertilizer explosion that devastated the town of West, Texas, killing 15 and causing an estimated $100 million in damage.  After the explosion, the accident was thoroughly investigated amid outcries for tighter regulation of fertilizer storage facilities, of which there are dozens all over the state. 

As you might expect from a blast that was so strong it registered on seismographs hundreds of miles away and dug a crater ten feet deep, any evidence as to what caused the fire that led to the explosion was pulverized and scattered almost beyond recognition.  The official investigation by the Texas State Fire Marshal's Office listed the cause as "unknown," which is true in a technical sense.  But what is known is that somehow, a fire started in a wooden structure housing around 270 tons of ammonium nitrate, which can detonate in milliseconds under the wrong conditions.  And many of those conditions—such as storage of the chemical in wooden bins, lack of adequate automatic fire control systems such as sprinklers, and keeping flammable materials such as fuel, batteries, and seed grains near ammonium nitrate stocks—still prevail in many of the other fertilizer facilities in Texas.

But no, we cannot say with iron-clad certainty exactly what started the fire that made the ammonium nitrate explode at West.  And for Mr. Dippel, it's the cause above everything.

The twisted logic he seems to be following goes like this:  If you don't know the cause of an accident, you can't place the blame, and if you can't place the blame, you can't take actions such as legislation to improve the safety of fertilizer facilities.  That's the only way I can see that a person of otherwise sound mind could come up with the following statement, which I quote exactly as it appears in the paper: 

"We don't know what happened at West, and we wish somebody could determine what happened so we make sure to correct what happened so it never happens again."

But unless somebody determines what happened, the official position of the Texas Ag Industries Association is that they do not want a bunch of new rules about how to store ammonium nitrate.

No one determined "the cause" (in Mr. Dippel's sense) of the fire aboard the cargo freighter Grandcamp, which was carrying 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate when its cargo detonated, wrecking most of the port of Texas City and killing over 500 people, including all but one member of the Texas City fire department.  This was back in 1947, sixty-six years and a day before the West explosion.  But the absence of an exact known cause didn't stop the port of Texas City from banning the transportation of ammonium nitrate in any form through its port facilities two years after the disaster. 

One definition of "cause" is that state of affairs which, if removed from a situation, would prevent the effect from occurring.  A lot of dangerous circumstances prevail in cities and towns where ammonium nitrate is stored, and if those circumstances are removed, the effect of another such explosion is less likely to happen.  If the owners of the plants and the first responders in their surrounding communities won't voluntarily take new safety measures (a few have, but many haven't), maybe changes in laws will.

In this year's Texas legislative session, several bills have been introduced to help prevent another West-style fertilizer disaster.  One of the most sensible, filed by Texas Rep. Kyle Kacal of College Station, would give the Texas State Fire Marshal authority to inspect locations where ammonium nitrate is stored.  At the very minimum, information shared from these inspections would help local fire departments plan for firefighting and evacuation, if necessary, in the case of fires at these facilities.  Other bills, such as the one by Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, would go farther and increase the mandatory amount of liability insurance carried by such plants.

To my mind, the single worst failing in the West disaster was lack of information.  The first responders apparently didn't know how dangerous the West Fertilizer Company fire was.  And the town had no plans for evacuation in case of a fire at the plant.  A similar fire in College Station led to the evacuation of a large area of town, fortunately without an explosion occurring.  Two simple measures—allowing inspections, and sharing information and training with first responders—could have prevented most of the loss of life and injuries at West, but not the millions in property damage.  To make sure such explosions don't happen in the future, fertilizer firms that store ammonium nitrate will have to clean up their act with improvements that will cost them money. 

One test of a society's ability to function is to watch how it deals with major disasters, and how well it acts to prevent them in the future.  Texas and Texans have dealt with major tragedies successfully in the past—hurricanes, tornadoes, oil-refinery explosions, and many other natural and self-inflicted messes—and I like to think that we come together in the aftermath to do the right, sensible, and just thing.  Perhaps this is a foolish hope, but I hope that suitable legislation is passed to make the West, Texas tragedy the last ammonium-nitrate disaster that Texans ever experience.

Sources:  The Austin American-Statesman carried the article "Despite West blast, industry crackdown unlikely," in its Friday, Apr. 17, 2015 print edition on pp. A1 and A8.  (The online edition is accessible only by subscription.)  I also used information from The Texas Observer's online article "West, Texas Blues" at http://www.texasobserver.org/west-tragedy-little-progress-ammonium-nitrate/.  The Texas City disaster is described in impressive detail by Bill Minutaglio in his 2003 book (HarperCollins) City on Fire, and the Texas City ban on ammonium nitrate is reported in that book on p. 270.  I also referred to the CNN article www.cnn.com/2013/04/23/us/texas-explosion/ for the size of the crater and to the Wikipedia articles on the West Fertilizer Company explosion and the Texas City disaster.

Do Not Sit Here: The Exploding Airbag Recall

Airbags are a required safety feature on cars sold in the U. S. since at least 1998.  They have undoubtedly saved lives, especially in situations where the driver or passengers neglected to use seatbelts.  So whatever else we say about them, we should bear in mind that overall, cars are probably safer with airbags than without them.  But only if the airbags themselves are safe.  And lately, some drivers have found that the airbag cure was much worse than the accident disease.

Over a hundred injuries and at least two fatalities have been attributed to defective airbags made by Japanese supplier Takata.  According to the New York Times, in 2009 a 33-year-old mother of three ran into a mail truck in Richmond, Virginia, and her airbag deployed.  The injuries from the wreck itself were minor.  But a piece of shrapnel from the metal canister containing the airbag explosive shot through her neck and she allegedly bled to death as a result. 

For an airbag to be an effective cushion during a collision, it has to deploy in well under a tenth of a second.  This involves creating a large volume of high-pressure gas in a short time.  The early airbags used an explosive called sodium azide, but the residue was toxic. So in the 1990s, manufacturers began to research other chemicals that would be less noxious and also allow for a smaller propellant package. 

Takata, one of the largest airbag suppliers in the world, developed a compound based largely on good old ammonium nitrate (the same chemical involved in the West, Texas explosion on April 17, 2013), along with other components designed to moderate the tendency of this substance to detonate and to absorb moisture.  The manufacture of any product involving explosives requires rigorous adherence to procedures that maintain the integrity of the ingredients all the way from the raw materials to the finished item.  But as various documents have indicated, Takata has not always been sufficiently diligent in their manufacturing processes.

As Takata has responded to inquiries by automaker customers and regulatory agencies, it has admitted to several manufacturing errors over the years.  Again according to the Times, one set of defective airbags was attributed to workers in a Mexican assembly plant who allowed moisture-sensitive explosive ingredients to sit on the plant floor too long in a humid environment.  Other documents show rusty propellant containers and foreign objects in the propellant cans may have been responsible.  Problems with the airbags began to show up as long ago as 2004, and in a series of widening recalls in the last few months, eleven automakers have recalled over 14 million vehicles for replacement of suspect airbags made by Takata.  Many of the vehicles being recalled are in the most humid states in the U. S., which indicates that deterioration due to high humidity is the main culprit here.  Toyota has told its dealers that if the replacement airbags on a recalled vehicle are not immediately available, they should put a sticker on the dashboard next to the defective airbag.  The sticker reads "Do Not Sit Here."  Good luck with that.

This particular story comes close to home, personally.  In our Honda household we operate both a Civic and an Element.  They are very good cars, but neither has been in a major collision that set off the airbags.  For this I am grateful.  I checked their VINs (vehicle identification numbers) at a U. S. government website designed to let owners know of any recalls out on their vehicles, and hit the jackpot both times.  I don't think I'll wait for the dealer to write me.  My 89-year-old father-in-law rides in the passenger seat of the Element.  It would be a shame for a World War II U. S. Navy veteran of the Pacific theater to be cut down by a defective Japanese airbag.  But it could happen, at least until I get those airbags replaced. 

As hazards go, this one is not worth lying awake nights about, unless maybe you work for Takata or one of the affected automakers.  As long as you're not in a wreck, apparently the airbags won't spontaneously combust, and most of them appear to work properly, especially if you don't live in an area that's particularly humid (watch out, Houstonians!).  But even a few defective airbags are too many. 

We won't know for some time why it took so long to uncover the problems and do something about them.  But some contributing factors are apparent already.  First, the problem arose not in a particular automaker's design (as was the case with the GM ignition recall), but with a supplier's manufacturing process.  It is impossible to test an airbag non-destructively, so except for sample testing, which automakers may or may not do, I'm not sure how they could have caught the problem by incoming inspections of Tanaka's product. 

People can be injured even by airbags that work properly and have no design or manufacturing defects, so sorting out incidents that involve defective airbags from those that don't is not a trivial problem, except in the glaringly obvious cases when metal shards from the airbag tear it to ribbons and slice into passengers.  And while the automakers did the minimum required when they received word about the airbag injuries, which was to notify the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) within five days, they don't have to give a lot of details.  And if the feds choose not to follow up the notification, the matter ends there, as it did for most of the last ten years.  Only when lawsuits and headlines began to pop up about the matter did the automakers start issuing recalls and pressured Takata to shape up.

I don't know what Takata's market share in the airbag industry is, but my guess is it's pretty high.  Companies that sell products to large OEM (original equipment manufacturer) firms often develop too-chummy relationships with their few customers, who in turn are reluctant to threaten to take their business elsewhere if problems arise.  It's the old monopoly problem, but in this case the consumer is harmed not by exploitative prices—I'm sure the automakers pressured Takata to keep their prices down—but by defective merchandise.  Unfortunately, there is no easy solution for this type of structural problem, except for buyers and regulators to be increasingly vigilant for signs that there is a manufacturing problem.

If you happen to drive one of the fourteen million vehicles affected by the recall, here's hoping you get your car to the dealer soon—and you get it back with something better than a "Do Not Sit Here" sticker.

Sources:  Car and Driver magazine's online edition carried a report on the recall that I referred to, at http://blog.caranddriver.com/massive-takata-airbag-recall-everything-you-need-to-know-including-full-list-of-affected-vehicles/.  I also referred to the New York Times article published online on Sept. 11, 2014 at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/business/air-bag-flaw-long-known-led-to-recalls.html.  The U. S. NHTSA's VIN recall website is at https://vinrcl.safercar.gov/vin/.

West One Year Later: Will It Happen Again?

On April 22, the U. S. Chemical Safety Board held a news conference to present its recommendations about how to prevent another disaster such as the one in West, Texas that killed fifteen, injured over 200, and caused millions of dollars of property damage on April 17, 2013.  So far, not a lot has changed in terms of federal or state regulations pertaining to ammonium nitrate, the fertilizer chemical that exploded on that fateful day.  But a fertilizer trade organization has issued a set of recommendations that, if followed, will go some distance toward reducing the chances that another disastrous accident involving the chemical will happen again.

As long ago as 2002, the Chemical Safety Board recommended that ammonium nitrate be included in OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and EPA (Environmental Protection Administration) regulatory programs, but these agencies have not yet chosen to act on these recommendations.  Ammonium nitrate falls in a gray area between chemicals such as nitroglycerin or TNT that are clearly dangerous, and others such as sand that are harmless.  Under most circumstances, ammonium nitrate can be handled with little or no risk.  But under certain combinations of heat, pressure, and/or shock, the chemical detonates, transforming many tons of solid matter into hot gases that expand explosively, as they did in West. 

In response to the West accident a trade organization called The Fertilizer Institute issued a fourteen-page booklet to its members last February with the title "Safety and Security Guidelines for the Storage and Transportation of Fertilizer Grade Ammonium Nitrate at Fertilizer Retail Facilities."  The title does not promise exciting reading, though the legalese and lengthy definitions of different types of ammonium-nitrate fertilizer are enlivened by color photos of fertilizer manufacturing and handling installations.  The pamphlet summarizes most of the precautions which, if followed, would have gone a long way toward preventing the West disaster. 

These measures fall into two categories: (1) ways to prevent ammonium nitrate from exploding in the first place, and (2) ways to avert death and destruction if a fire breaks out where ammonium nitrate is stored, and the stuff explodes anyway.  The prevention measures are more or less what you'd expect:  things like storing the material in non-combustible bins, rather than wooden ones as were used in the West firm; installing sprinkler systems or other fire-prevention and fire-fighting facilities; and treating places where ammonium nitrate is stored like flammable-material storage areas (no-smoking signs, no sparks or flames nearby, etc.).  Because an exact cause of the fire at West that led to the explosion may never be found, we cannot know for certain if these precautions would have prevented the tragedy.  But obviously, they are good things to do, and if fertilizer retailers around the country follow these prevention guidelines, the chances of another such accident will be reduced.

The second category of recommendations is more problematic.  It involves informing the wider community, including first-responder agencies, that ammonium nitrate is stored in the facility and should be treated with extra caution.  By the nature of the business, many fertilizer retailers are located in semi-rural or thinly populated areas.  These locales are often served by volunteer fire departments, and while volunteer firemen theoretically should be trained as well as full-time paid firefighters, the reality is that their training may be on the sketchy side.   The Chemical Safety Board concluded that the first responders in West did not know of the dangers presented by the large quantity of ammonium nitrate stored at the plant where they responded to what appeared at first to be an ordinary fire, and were much too close for safety.  Consequently, when the plant exploded, most of the people who died were firefighters.  The guidance handbook says "The rule of thumb is if outside emergency responders are necessary, do not fight AN [ammonium nitrate] fires.  For fires that have engaged AN, plans should focus on evacuation of the area."  In other words: don't fight, run. 

While the trade-association brochure's advice is good, it has no legal standing, and firms are free to adopt its recommendations or ignore them.  Simply as a matter of asset protection, I would hope that fertilizer retailers who sell ammonium nitrate are at least considering an upgrade of unsafe storage facilities, and the brochure provides good guidelines as to how to carry this out.  However, the informational side of the recommendations may be harder to implement.  A business owner may feel some reluctance in volunteering the information to local authorities that his facility harbors material that might reduce a wide swath of his neighborhood to rubble.  Nevertheless, there may be courageous and conscientious owners who will do such things. 

Both the Chemical Safety Board and various other authorities have called for tighter compulsory regulation of ammonium nitrate storage and transportation.  This is a political as well as a technical and ethical matter, and politics these days tends to go to polarized extremes.  On the one hand are those who favor centralized uniform federal regulations for all sorts of things, including ammonium nitrate.  On the other hand, a prominent plank in the Tea Party platform is the idea that government regulations have gone too far and are stifling free enterprise and economic growth.  The regulations contemplated with regard to ammonium nitrate vary from rules about how the stuff is stored to rules about notification and training of local first responders.  It seems to me that sensible regulations requiring the exchange of information, perhaps implemented by some sort of web-based registry, would be the least costly way to make sure that at a minimum, any firefighters responding to an ammonium-nitrate fire would know what they are dealing with and would take appropriate precautions. 

One way of dealing with this information problem is by the use of fire codes.  However, the state of Texas has a strong history of anti-regulatory bias.  In fact, counties with low population density in Texas are actually prohibited by state law from enacting fire codes at all.  So around July and December, you see roadside fireworks stands popping up for a few weeks with nary a concern for any safety beyond the immediate self-preservation of the owners in case a customer drops a burning cigarette. 

So far, the only concrete public action toward preventing more ammonium-nitrate fertilizer disasters has been the Fertilizer Institute's brochure.  While they deserve credit for their efforts, only time will tell whether enough has changed to keep another fertilizer plant from blowing up, or to save lives if it does.

Sources:  The news conference in Dallas on Apr. 22, 2014 held by the Chemical Safety Board was summarized by a UPI report at http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2014/04/22/US-investigators-Better-regulation-could-have-prevented-deadly-fertilizer-explosion/4731398190424/.  The Chemical Safety Board's own statements at the conference can be downloaded at http://www.csb.gov/assets/1/16/Statement_-_News_Conference_(Final).pdf.  The Fertilizer Institute recommendations can be found at http://www.tfi.org/ammonium_nitrate_guidelines.  And I blogged on the West explosion previously on Apr. 22 and May 20, 2013.