© Photo from instagram.com user andybarteeWest Texas Explosion
The explosion occurred around 7:50pm local time in the town of West, north of Waco. A fireball of nearly 100 feet high has been reported along with a massive power outage.
A spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, D.L. Wilson, told Reuters the explosion had resulted in "probably hundreds of casualties," saying he did not know if any of those were fatalities.
An official number of fatalities has yet to be confirmed but 60 people have been admitted to Hillcrest Hospital in Waco, just one of the multiple emergency facilities in the area.
The explosion destroyed a nearby nursing home, where it is thought that people may still be trapped inside.
Roughly 150 survivors from the damaged nursing home had been evacuated and sent to a community center outside of town, while doctors and staff of the Hillcrest Hospital have been taking in the first wave of burn victims. Fire units were draining water from community pools to douse the flames.
More than 1,000 people are said to be without electricity, according to local ABC News affiliate KXXV.
A large swath of West was "leveled" in the explosion, according to WFAA-TV Dallas reporter Jason Whitely.
West's population was 2,674 at the 2010 census. The town is located 19.3 miles north of Waco, Texas and 70 miles south of the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area.
First responders requested a bomb squad to investigate a pervasive scent of flammable chemicals. Multiple barns in the area are engulfed in flames.
© Photo from twitter.com user @mariahrain14
Police officers were seen transporting the injured in their squad cars.
At least 10 other buildings are on fire, including the town middle school, according to local media outlets. Every available ambulance has been dispatched while fire crews from neighboring areas have rushed to the scene.
An emergency responder requested help over local radio with a "major collapse" on a second floor where children were thought to be trapped.
Multiple commenters on RT's story reported feeling the blast from their homes, which in some cases were located dozens of miles from the fertilizer plant.
One witness told the Waco Tribune "every house within about four blocks is blown apart.
Waco Tribune reporter Kirsten Crow posted a photo of people being treated at a local football field:
© Photo from twitter.com user @Bird1304
One of Largest Non-Nuclear Explosions in History was ANFO-esque.
One of my mid-1960's era Time Life Nature and Science Series Books notes that one of the largest - if not the largest - non-nuclear explosions in history was done with 1,375 tonnes of an ammonium nitrate-based explosive called Nitramex2h, on April 5, 1958, to destroy an underwater mountain shipping hazard called “Ripple Rock” in the Seymour Narrows of the Discovery Passage in British Columbia, Canada.
Wiked Pee Pee Ah states that “Nitramex and Nitramon Explosives are compositions of various chemical compounds. They are explosives based on ammonium nitrate and other ingredients such as paraffin wax, aluminum and dinitrotoluene. The binding of these additional ingredients creates a more stable explosive. Nitramex and Nitramon have been replaced by more modern high explosives based on ammonium nitrate such as ANFO.”
R.C.
P.s., In getting the above information, I learned that (a) It could get as shallow as 9 feet at low tide; and (b) there were uniistened-to-objections about how it would be smarter to use Ripple Rock's two mountain tops as a bridge bases. At a minimum, It sure seems it would have been a lot cheaper to simply have put two steel towers with lights on those tops; eh? But governments' have never been known to be logically econdomical with OUR money, now, have they?
CONCLUSION: Seems most likely it was a modern "Bread and Circuses" approach; particularly since it was the first TV "Event" broadcast live across all of Canada.
RC