The mayor said this was also a grain storage facility and he thinks the grain may have exploded, too. Rice and soybean and wheat dust is very combustible.
Why not? What’s a few more combustibles on sight with tons of fertilizer when you allowed a nursing home, apartment building, and school to be placed within the minimum safe distance for a truck full of fertilizer on fire? Got to have that tax money!
This is a multifaceted failure, but most incredible to me was the failure of proper urban zoning based on standard risk assessments. I am horrified that a nursing home was approximately 500 feet away from such a facility. It really makes you mad when you look at it in terms of risk mitigation/assessment.
I’d bet the nursing home and apartments were built after the plant. And it’s not neccessary about taxes. It’s more about people having a job. And we know there’s no place that’s 100% safe.
I’d bet the nursing home and apartments were built after the plant. And it’s not neccessary about taxes. It’s more about people having a job. And we know there’s no place that’s 100% safe.
“Proper urban zoning”??
No.
This is a small Texas town, rural in nature, touched on one side by the masses that travel north and south along the interstate.
These little towns don’t zone. They just grow (or shrink) slowly as they see fit. The fertilizer plant had been there for decades. Nobody was forced to live near the plant, nor were they prevented from doing so.
It’s called freedom. We do a lot of that in Texas. Usually it works out quite well.
The interstate and railroad, with all their hazardous cargo, also pose threats, but we live alongside them every day.
The “tax money” comment was snarky and unnecessary.
West makes more money off its heritage than it ever has off that fertilizer plant.
When Texas was an independent nation (and even before, as the nationalities of the heroes of the Alamo will attest), people came from many countries to settle here, even establish embassies and diplomatic ties. Many of them stayed. To this day, we have numerous ethnic Texas towns that integrate their original culture with our Texas independence.
West is Czech and well-known for its kolache shops and festival. We have the Germans of Boerne and Fredericksburg and the Hill Country, and Muenster and its surrounds, the Danes of Danevang, so many more.
If you want to consider West’s tax base, look at the kolache trade. It’s one of those places you simply can’t drive past.