Texas Explosion Seen as Sign of Weak U.S. Oversight
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-19/texas-explosion-seen-as-sign-of-weak-u-s-oversight.html
Smoke rises from the rubble of a house next to the fertilizer plant that exploded yesterday afternoon on April 18, 2013 in West, Texas.
The Texas plant that was the scene of a deadly explosion this week was last inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1985. The risk plan it filed with regulators listed no flammable chemicals. And it was cleared to hold many times the ammonium nitrate that was used in the Oklahoma City bombing.
For worker- and chemical-safety advocates who have been pushing the U.S. government to crack down on facilities that make or store large quantities of hazardous chemicals, the blast in West, Texas, was a grim reminder of the risks these plants pose. And they say regulators haven’t done enough to tackle the problem.
“Definitely, somewhere along the line at the federal level, there was a failure,” Sean Moulton, director of open government policy at the Center for Effective Government, a Washington-based watchdog, said in an interview. “It was quite clear that they just didn’t consider flammability or explosiveness to be a problem, and given what occurred that was clearly shortsighted.”
The April 17 fire and explosion at Adair Grain Inc.’s West Fertilizer Co. plant flattened houses and devastated the center of the town of West, about 80 miles south of Dallas. Search crews had recovered 12 bodies as of noon today and 200 people were reported injured, making it the worst U.S. industrial disaster in three years. U.S. Senator John Cornyn said 60 people remain unaccounted for.
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I want to hear him argue that the residents, or even better, the chemical company needs to rebuild this city on their own. 
are just the poster boys. There's a vocal libertarian influence here at DU, and one can't help but scratch one's head at the flagrant hypocrisy. I, personally, want the people of West, TX to get all the assistance they need to recover, even though I probably disagree with them on nearly every policy position.
It'll certainly be interesting when the complaints start rolling in from these rugged individualists start griping on the teevee that the radical Muslin..Kenyan..Socialist in the WH didn't monitor this factory close enough, and isn't doling out the socialist cash fast enough. You and I both know it's coming. It's ironic that these rugged individualists get back far more money than they send to the federal government.
