A Grim Day for a Small Town

Photo Credit: Associated Press

By ANN ZIMMERMAN, SHELLY BANJO and NATHAN KOPPEL. This small town just off I-35, known in central Texas as a good place to pull off the highway for Czech pastries, spent Thursday coming to grips with a landscape of flattened homes and diminishing hopes that friends and neighbors will be found alive in the aftermath of a devastating explosion.

The blast Wednesday night at a fertilizer plant here has left more than a dozen dead, and 150 injured. It destroyed a school and 75 or so homes—damaging a sizable portion of a tightknit town of 2,800 with a Czech heritage that stretches back generations.

The majority of the dead are believed to be first responders, who had raced to the scene to try to tame a fire at the plant, not knowing the mammoth blast was coming. The explosion had the force of a 2.1 magnitude earthquake, seismologists said.

Law-enforcement officials are still sifting through the rubble in search of survivors, but none are expected, said Tommy Muska, the town’s mayor. Mr. Muska, who lost his own home on Wednesday, is a volunteer firefighter himself—as well as an insurance agent in town.

“Our town is definitely hurting,” he said. His office was flooded with insurance claims. Read more from this story HERE.

Crews seek survivors, bodies after Texas blast

By NOMAAN MERCHANT and JOHN L. MONE. Rescuers searched the smoking remnants of a Texas farm town Thursday for survivors of a thunderous fertilizer plant explosion, gingerly checking smashed houses and apartments for anyone still trapped in debris while the community awaited word on the number of dead.

Initial reports put the fatalities as high as 15, but later in the day, authorities backed away from any estimate and refused to elaborate. More than 160 people were hurt.

A breathtaking band of destruction extended for blocks around the West Fertilizer Co. in the small community of West. The blast shook the ground with the strength of a small earthquake and crumpled dozens of homes, an apartment complex, a school and a nursing home. Its dull boom could be heard dozens of miles away from the town about 20 miles north of Waco.

Waco police Sgt. William Patrick Swanton described ongoing search-and-rescue efforts as “tedious and time-consuming,” noting that crews had to shore up much of the wreckage before going in.

There was no indication the blast, which sent up a mushroom-shaped plume of smoke and left behind a crater, was anything other than an industrial accident, he said. Read more from this story HERE.