7. Love and Loss in a Small Texas Town (July 2013)
“At 7:49 pm, 20 minutes after the initial call had gone out about a fire at West Fertilizer Co., the building began to collapse. Falling heavy debris detonated about 30 tons of ammonium nitrate, enough to fill a third of a railcar. The energy released was the equivalent of almost 20,000 pounds of dynamite.
The explosion was so powerful that the U.S. Geological Survey near Lake Whitney registered it as a 2.1-magnitude earthquake. It left a crater almost 100 feet wide and 10 feet deep, blowing through the plant’s three-foot-thick cement foundation. The mushroom cloud that resulted was visible from Arlington, 80 miles away.”
