Devastating explosion during a fire at a fertilizer plant in Waco TX. Many injured and evacuating the surrounding area. It appears to be an accidental fire and unrelated to the Boston incident. [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNJ5V-X5QZ8"]Huge Explosion Waco Texas Fertilizer Plant Explosion HD - YouTube[/ame]
Evidently hundreds are injured, many homes were leveled and many fatalities. Firefighters were on the scene at the time of the explosion. A nursing home and apartment building were damaged as well.
I listened to the news reports while driving into work this morning. It's the 20 year anniversary of the Waco siege and everyone is hoping the two occurances aren't linked.
Police are saying they don't think foul play was involved. But now that Simon mentions it, it IS the twenty-year anniversary of the Waco siege ending...that's an awfully big coincidence. Also worth noting, is that the Oklahoma City Bombing, which Timothy McVeigh did in retaliation for the Waco Siege, used a fertilizer bomb. So on the twentieth anniversary of the Waco Siege, a fertilizer plant in Waco blows up, and it's a coincidental industrial accident? It's not impossible, but I would look VERY hard for signs of foul play. CNN is saying that the nursing home and 60 residential homes were flattened. I don't even want to speculate on the death toll. Can we as a nation just take a mulligan over this whole week? Jesus Christ.
I guess the town is called West Texas it is right near Waco. The surrounding area was being evacuated because of toxic fumes from the fire. The explosion happened while that was underway. Last I heard the death toll was 12 people, but it likely that that number will increase as they sort everything out.
Wiki also pointed out that the Virginia Tech shooting was on the 17th of April. Not sure if that ties into anything at all? I had thought of this as probably a badly timed accident but reading your post that's an awful lot of coincidence.
How many days aren't the anniversary of one major incident or another in a country the size of the US?
Very true, but I think that it is the proximity of this one to the Waco siege that causes eyebrows to raise
Officials are now revising their statement of foul play, saying that they do not have "any evidence" but "are not ruling it out." Considering they haven't yet had time to even search the factory for signs of foul play, the first part of the statement isn't very conclusive. It's 5-15 confirmed dead with dozens still unaccounted for. Unfortunately, in situations like this, "unaccounted for" often means "dead but body not yet recovered."
The Waco Siege was not just some minor incident only visible in hindsight. For anti-government extremists, it has always been what the Boston Massacre was to revolutionaries, what Pearl Harbor was for the US in WWII, what Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount was for the Second Intifada, etc. And this would not be the first time that the anniversary of the Waco Siege was used by a right-wing extremist. On the second anniversary of the siege, and expressly because of the siege, Timothy McVeigh killed 168 and injured 680 in the nation's worst act of domestic terrorism.
This kind of incident would be very out of character for an anti-Federalist group. The militia nutjob contingent might not think twice about attacking a federal building or targeting law enforcement, but I dont see them as the type of terrorist who would target innocent (in their minds) civilians.
The ATF (for the Brits, that's a federal agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) is treating it as a crime scene until anything is ruled out. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...7ef-11e2-a8e2-5b98cb59187f_story.html?hpid=z1 That's not something I normally see in industrial accidents. I think there's some serious concerns this wasn't accidental, even though they haven't found physical evidence of what started the fire yet. Eric Robert Rudolph's bombing of Centennial Olympic Park
Even that had a very overt political motivation. Blowing up a fertilizer plant is hardly the same kind of attack.
Seeing the explosion, they may not have bodies to discover. The video where the kid loses his hearing, they were probably a couple football fields away. If you lose your hearing and have your phone thrown from your hand from overpressure at that distance, there is a very likely chance people were vaporized. Horrible thing to have happen, this whole week.
Maybe it was an accident, maybe it was a terror attack, I don't know either way. But given it occurring on the 20th anniversary of the Waco siege and given its proximity in time to the Boston terror attack and the ricin attack on President Obama, I think there needs to be a very thorough investigation. And the federal government agrees.
I would think that the EPA, OSHA, or other governing agency would have placed safeguards for such plants Fir example, I worked at a grain storage and grain elevator facility, no resdients allowed with a certain radius Good thing too, many years after I had left, there was a large explosion leveling a lot of the facility and surrounding forestation. Minor casualties as it was on the 2nd shift.
They used to use fertilizer mixed with fuel and and a half stick of dynamite to blow tree stumps etc. Was a lot cheaper than straight dynamite. It was referred to as "farmers friend"
Death toll is now at 35, with other officials predicting it could rise to 70 as search and rescue/recovery efforts continue. http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/18/us/texas-explosion/index.html?hpt=hp_c3
