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WEST, Tex. — As the authorities continued to sift through the debris left by the devastating explosion at a fertilizer plant here, scores of people were still missing, and the number of dead rose to 14, most of them firefighters and other emergency responders who were the first to arrive at the scene.
WEST, Tex. — Two days after the explosion at a fertilizer plant in this town sliced by a busy railroad and highway in Central Texas, the death toll rose to 14, but with the search of damaged structures nearly finished by Friday afternoon, only a few people were still presumed missing, local and county officials said.
“We’re still in search-and-rescue mode,” Sgt. Jason Reyes of the Texas Department of Public Safety said at a news conference on Friday morning.
Earlier in the day, after he had toured the site, Senator John Cornyn of Texas said that 60 people remained unaccounted for, an estimate that included many people who had been reported missing by relatives unable to locate them immediately after the blast. But Judge Scott Felton of McLennan County, who joined Gov. Rick Perry at an afternoon news conference, said that he would be “surprised if it’s more than a few.”
Mr. Reyes did not discuss the number of missing, but later in the day, Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said that 60 people were missing.
Mr. Perry said there was “absolute devastation” in the area around the fertilizer plant, adding, “It’s going to be a long recovery.” Through the night and much of the day, the authorities removed bodies from the rubble, most of them firefighters and other emergency responders who were the first to arrive at the plant. One of them was Capt. Kenny Harris of the Dallas Fire-Rescue, a married father of three who had been off-duty when he learned of the fire and went there to help, a spokesman for Dallas Fire-Rescue said.
“We still don’t know the extent of their loss,” Mr. Cornyn said.
Sgt. Jason Reyes of the Texas Department of Public Safety said that about 200 people were injured and that at least 50 homes were damaged by the explosion, which was caused by a fire inside the plant on Wednesday evening. The plant is surrounded by houses, a 50-unit apartment complex, three schools and a nursing home.
About 200 people were injured by the blast, which tore apart an entire section of West, a small town of roughly 2,800 residents 80 miles south of Dallas. By daybreak on Friday, rescue personnel had combed through 150 buildings, though there were 25 more to go. Fifty homes were completely destroyed, as well as three fire trucks and one ambulance, Sergeant Reyes said.
Investigators from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the United States Chemical Safety Board and other federal agencies swarmed the remains of the plant on Friday. They focused on a pair of reinforced steel tanks that stored anhydrous ammonia, an inexpensive liquid fertilizer commonly used across rural America. Under some conditions, it can turn into flammable gas.
“There are homes that are no longer homes,” said Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton, a spokesman for the Waco Police Department, on Wednesday.
Last summer, the United States Pipeline and Hazardous Material Administration fined the plant, a retail and warehouse facility for grains and fertilizer, $10,000 for safety violations, citing inadequate markings on the tanks and deficient transportation plans for the fertilizer. Farmers hauled it away from the plant in tanks pegged to the backs of their pickup trucks. The fine was settled for $5,250, according to agency records.
A spokesman for the F.B.I. in San Antonio said Thursday that there had been no indication of criminal activity in the West plant explosion.
“The experts don’t know what happened, and I am going to leave it to the experts,” the plant’s foreman, Jerry Sinkale, said in a brief interview on Friday.
Members of the West Volunteer Fire Department and those of other towns had responded to a fire that broke out at the plant about 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, and were fighting the blaze when the blast occurred about 7:50 p.m.
The investigation, Sergeant Reyes said, would most likely continue for at least several days.
“The explosion came very quickly,” Sergeant Swanton said. “They knew the threat. They knew the seriousness of the situation they were in. They immediately started moving to an evacuation process, absolutely doing the right thing to try and get people out of harm’s way.”
Outside St. Mary’s Catholic Church, where volunteers grilled ribs and sausages for the rescuers, Dr. George N. Smith, recalled how the flames brightened the darkening sky over the plant, which is near his house and across from the nursing home where he was the medical director. All but one of the 127 nursing home residents survived the fire and explosion, aided in their escape by friends, relatives, strangers and rescue workers who responded.
Perry Calvin, 37, a married father of two with a third on the way, was one of the volunteer firefighters killed. He had been attending an emergency medical technician class in West on Wednesday evening when a firefighter in the class got a page about the fire at the fertilizer company, said his father, Phil Calvin.
A broadcast on the police scanner, which many residents have in their homes, said, “Anybody who can, please, go help at the rest home,” recalled Dorothy Warren, 63, who tried to make her way to the scene. Ms. Warren was stopped at one of the roadblocks that quickly sprouted here, she said. The roadblocks were still in place on Friday afternoon.
Perry Calvin and another man drove to the area together and got there before the explosion. The other man was found dead Wednesday night.
Dr. Smith said nursing home workers had a well-rehearsed evacuation plan in case of a fire at the plant: they shut off the air-conditioning system, placed wet towels under doors to keep out the fumes and called school buses to come pick up the residents.
Perry Calvin was not even a firefighter with the West department. He volunteered with another department in a nearby town, but had rushed to help because he happened to be close.
“We were thinking of a fire, not an explosion,” said Dr. Smith, who got a gash on his nose from the debris from the blast. “So we just had to wing it.”
“He would do what he could to put the fire out or help find people,” said Mr. Calvin, the fire chief of Navarro Mills, Tex.
He ordered one of the nurses to get on the intercom and “tell everyone to go to Station 1,” the section of the nursing home farthest from the burning plant. He put towels under the front doors while the nurses, at the back of the building, set up wheelchairs for residents who could not walk. Then, Dr. Smith and the nurses got the people who came by to help in the evacuation to serve as escorts, leading the residents to a community center nearby.
Law enforcement officials said they had not determined the cause of either the fire or the explosion.
The only death, of a man “who was very sick,” happened on the way there, Dr. Smith said.
“The experts don’t know what happened, and I am going to leave it to the experts,” said Jerry Sinkale, the foreman at the plant, who would not comment on the explosion or its causes.
His eyes welled up and his voice broke as he added, “I find comfort in the fact that I may have helped saved some lives.”
The blast occurred two days before the anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, an attack set off by explosives made from fertilizer that killed 168 people on April 19, 1995. And it happened two days after bombs exploded at the finish line at the Boston Marathon.
Throughout the town on Friday, residents held on to the good news out of the nursing home — any good news, like the story of a woman who saw a neighbor she had presumed dead walk through the doors of the town’s post office, which was open for business and became a sort of joyous gathering spot.
The White House issued a statement from President Obama, in which he pledged that the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other federal agencies would join state and local efforts “to make sure there are no unmet needs as search and rescue and response operations continue.”
Many people displaced by the explosion took shelter not at the community center, where cots had been set up for them, but at the homes of friends and family who still had roofs over their heads.
Gov. Rick Perry called the explosion “a truly nightmare scenario” and said that information about death and injury was “very preliminary.” But he said that because of West’s small size, “this tragedy has most likely hit every family.”
At the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 4819, donated clothing was organized on tables set against the walls of a room that was also lined with cots where some rescue workers had slept. It was there that many of the nursing home’s residents ended up late on Wednesday; someone brought in blankets and the residents sat in wheelchairs.
The response by federal officials echoed that of some of the country’s deadliest bombings, fires and acts of terrorism. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sent a 20-member national response team of explosives specialists, chemists and other experts, as had been done after the Oklahoma City bombing and the attack on the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. The Chemical Safety Board, the federal entity that investigates chemical disasters, said that it had sent a team too.
West lost three of its four school buildings in the explosion, which also damaged about 20 school buses, the entire fleet. On Friday, trucks lined up outside the one surviving campus, of the West Elementary School, bringing in chairs, portable classrooms and supplies. Classes are expected to resume on Monday.
The plant, operated by the West Chemical and Fertilizer Company, which is owned by Adair Grain Inc., had only nine employees. It did not manufacture any products, but instead stored and sold agricultural chemicals and fertilizer to farmers. The company stored substantial amounts of anhydrous ammonia and ammonium nitrate, chemicals used as commercial fertilizers that can become explosive under proper conditions.
“Evil visited with us Wednesday night, but the good Lord was with us too,” Larry Hykel, president of the West Independent School District Board of Trustees, said in an interview. “We will rise from the ashes.”
A filing late last year with the Environmental Protection Agency stated that the company stored 540,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate on the site and 110,000 pounds of anhydrous ammonia.
Manny
Fernandez contributed reporting.
Records kept by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration show that the agency last inspected the plant 28 years ago. In that inspection, dated Feb. 13, 1985, the agency found five “serious” violations, including ones involving improper storage and handling of anhydrous ammonia and improper respiratory protection for workers. The agency imposed a $30 penalty on the company.
Last June, the company was fined $5,250 by the federal Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration for violations involving anhydrous ammonia. An investigator reported the violations after an inspection of the plant in September 2011, and the agency later determined that the company had corrected the violations.
An OSHA spokesman said the plant was not included in its so-called National Emphasis Plan for inspections because it did not produce explosives and had no major prior accidents, and the E.P.A. did not rate it as a major risk.
Zak Covar, the executive director of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said the company had been in business since 1962 and was one of a number of small fertilizer companies across rural Texas. The company has “an average compliance history,” with one air-quality complaint registered. In that episode, on June 9, 2006, according to state records, residents complained to the commission about an “ammonia smell” that was “very bad last night.”
That occurrence was investigated by the agency and resolved with the granting of two air permits to the company by the end of that year, Mr. Covar said.
Because it was built in 1962, the facility was grandfathered in to state regulations, Mr. Covar said. The company was supposed to get reauthorized in 2004, but failed to do so. Mr. Covar did not know the reason.
Raymond J. Snokhous, a retired lawyer who lives in West, spoke of the blast, seesawing between sadness over the devastation and relief at having survived it.
“It was a dandy, I tell you,” he said in a telephone interview, adding: “That was a bad experience. Fortunately, we got through it unscathed, but unfortunately, a lot of people didn’t.”
He was sitting with friends on Wednesday evening at the Knights of Columbus Hall, several hundred yards from the plant, for the group’s regular meeting. “We were just about to get it started when the dadgum thing blew,” he said 24 hours later. “It shook that building so bad — knocked a lot of the guys out of their chairs. All the ceiling panels and so forth came down, and the light fixtures fell out and the insulation fell out all over everything, and it was not a pleasant sight. The noise was excruciating.”
Two of his second cousins, he said, were killed in the explosion. “They were firemen,” he said. “Two young lives that didn’t need to go — but they’re gone.”
The town of West is home to a number of Czech-Americans, and one of its most popular stores is the Czech Stop and Little Czech Bakery, which serves strudels and kolaches, a puffy pastry filled with meat or fruit.
The Embassy of the Czech Republic in Washington issued a statement expressing its condolences to the families of the victims, several of whom were of Czech descent, embassy officials said.
The Czech ambassador, Petr Gandalovic, arrived in West on Thursday.
One of the firefighters who died was Kenny Harris, 52, a captain with Dallas Fire-Rescue. He lived in West, but was not a member of the town’s volunteer department. He had been off duty when he learned of the fire at the plant, according to a spokesman for Dallas Fire-Rescue.
“Captain Harris rushed to the scene, compelled to provide assistance to his community during this crisis,” Mayor Mike Rawlings of Dallas said in a statement. “I want to express my deepest condolences to his family, friends and co-workers.”
Captain Harris was married and the father of three sons. He had served with Dallas Fire-Rescue for 30 years.
Clifford Krauss and Fernanda Santos reported from West, Tex. Manny Fernandez contributed reporting from West, John Schwartz and Emma G. Fitzsimmons from New York.
