The blast sent Robby Payne into a plastic tank of liquid cattle feed, knocking him unconscious. Had he not been wearing 25 pounds of firefighting gear, which buffered the impact, he might well have perished. Payne, a college track star-turned-funeral director, remembers none of it. “My memory,” he said, “cuts out sometime before the explosion occurred.” This he considers a blessing. He came away with a broken ankle, broken ribs, broken cheekbones, broken teeth, a concussion, and a slew of gashes. But no recollection of the event itself, which killed 15 people, 12 of them firefighters or other emergency responders. “As far as I was concerned,” said Payne, 58, “I was not there.” The backstory: At 7:29 p.m. on April 17, 2013, a fire was reported at West Fertilizer, an agricultural-products retailer that had served farmers in Central Texas since 1962. Three plywood bins at the facility were loaded with as much as 60 tons of ammonium nitrate, a granular fertilizer that’s benign under most conditions but can become destructive when stored improperly — as was the case at West Fertilizer — or intentionally detonated. The Germans used ammonium nitrate in bombs during World War I before it gained popularity as a fertilizer. It obliterated three freighters on Galveston Bay in 1947, killing 581 people and leveling or burning down much of Texas City, Texas, in what remains the nation’s worst industrial accident. Timothy McVeigh used it to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and kill 168 people in 1995. Fires at a fertilizer plant in Bryan, Texas, in 2009 and a fertilizer warehouse in Athens, Texas, in 2014 had calamitous potential but wound up hurting no one.
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Despite the threat it poses, fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate is not as closely regulated as it could be. It was left off a list of hazardous substances marked for special attention by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Its purveyors escaped, through a judge’s decision, tougher scrutiny by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Location-specific information about it is hard to come by, ostensibly for security reasons. In most states, there’s no easy way for the public to know where ammonium nitrate is kept in amounts big enough to do harm.
Under President Barack Obama, the EPA issued a rule aimed at preventing explosions, fires and toxic releases from chemical plants, oil refineries and smaller facilities such as West Fertilizer. Under Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, the agency excised or weakened key provisions of the rule, which it described as “burdensome.” Some of these provisions were designed to protect first responders like Robby Payne.