As Gov. Rick Perry touts the Texas Miracle to lure businesses from New York, Sen. Barbara Boxer will hold a hearing this week on the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas. But back home in Texas where 16 fertilizer plants are as large as the one in West, officials are putting the lazy in laissez-faire by adopting a voluntary “fertilizer happens” plan. Apparently Texans are on their own when it comes to industrial accidents, and the only government that bears any responsibility is the one in Washington that should be paying to rebuild everything.
Reactions from Texas Republicans ranged from disappointment to betrayal when the Federal Emergency Management Agency denied Texas’ request for $34.4 million for uninsured losses, most of which would go to rebuild a school. FEMA has already given West $16 million to reimburse them for first responders and clean up, but Texas application was rejected because the state failed to demonstrate that it didn’t have the money.
This struck some local officials as a broken promise by the president who told Texans at the memorial service, “Your country will remain ever ready to help you recover and rebuild and reclaim your community.”
“While President Obama has turned his back on Texas and gone against his word, we will continue to take care of our neighbors,” said Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott, Rick Perry’s heir apparent, in a statement.
Just how Texas will take care of its neighbors was up for debate for two hours of public testimony last week before the Texas House Public Safety Committee. The chairman, Democrat Rep. Joe Pickett, wanted to focus on “lessons to be learned” from the explosion that killed 15 people and destroyed three schools, an apartment complex, and entire neighborhoods.
The main lesson Texas officials want to convey is that this is just not their responsibility. For example, it is not the state’s duty to inspect the 129 companies that have at least 10,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate to see if they comply with the fire code. This is because the state forbids rural counties where these plants usually are located from having fire codes.
When a lawmaker asked State Fire Marshal Chris Connealy whether he knew whether any of those 16 plants as large as the one in West also had schools or homes nearby, Connealy responded with a succinct, “No, sir.”
The best that Texas can do is to come up with a website where Texans can search by zip code to see whether they live near a business that handles ammonium nitrate. This, the state’s first and so far only post-West reform to safety rules, would be as likely to prevent another explosion as a sex offender registry is to keep people from getting raped.
Of course, that wasn’t all that the panel demanded. In addition to the website, the lawmakers asked the state fire marshal to “offer” to inspect fertilizer plants, to research whether federal law requires disclosure of hazardous chemicals on site, and to offer rural committees “best practices” on fire codes despite the fact that federal law forbids counties with fewer than 250,000 residents from adopting their own fire codes. All of this would be strictly voluntary.
But even that meek response was too much for one committee member, Republican Rep. Dan Flynn, who warned, “You can paperwork a company to death with just list after list, and signs, and of this kind of stuff. I think we need to keep it in perspective. I think it’s a major problem and an accident.”
Whatever his faults, inconsistency is not one of them. Rep. Flynn also offered an anti-regulatory response to the Newtown shooting, offering a bill to cut the number of hours training hours required to get a concealed handgun license from 10 to four.
“A lot of people who try to get their license, they have to take a day off of work, or they have to take a whole Saturday to go do this where, four hours, range time, you can do the same thing and it accomplishes it,” he explained.
So far, no Texas official has acknowledged publicly acknowledged the obvious, that our official response is to encourage economic growth and cross our fingers that this will never happen again. But we should not be surprised. Believing that business is always the answer and government is always the problem is an article of faith in the Texas Miracle.
The article conveniently omits the part where the fertilizer plant was hit by a missile. Figures that this story pushing for more regulations comes from the Houston Chronicle, a Hearst company, a corporation which has a long history upholding yellow journalism.
True, about the Chronicle
but…
I guess, you don’t know anyone who lives in West, TX…or near any of the other plants, refineries…works/worked in them, drilling/fracking (on-shore & off-shore)…etc. (We’re 6th and 8th Generation Tx) Those “laws” are the Reality and people need to Know it. Don’t live near them, Don’t work in them, and pray that they don’t infect the soil/water. Something I was taught, long ago.
:/
Angel, I’m sorry for the losses of your friends and family. This was a horrendous atrocity, and this devastation should never be perpetrated on decent people.
But please don’t confuse the explosion that occurred at the West, Texas, plant with fertilizer. Every small town in a farming community with fertilizer plants and distributors is like this, with people living near or around these businesses. I’m from many generations growing up near one in a farming community and still know many of the active farmers and business people in that community, so I’m not ignorant on the subject.
People live near these plants and distributors because fertilizer materials are not inherently explosive. To use this fertilizer as an explosive would require the mixing of a flammable explosive material evenly throughout it, and then some type of specialized ignition device. The myth of big explosions due to fertilizer was started by government goons who blew up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City with small sophisticated bombs and blamed it on fertilizer.
No one, NO ONE, in the farming communities wants any more bolshevik regulations stuffed down their throats. Farming has to be one of the most regulated and controlled businesses in this country, from dusk to dawn, from seed to sales, what seed can be planted, what and how much fertilizer to apply, what pesticides are to be applied, even how much dust is allowed to be stirred up, with prices controlled at every step – seed is expensive and cannot be saved, expensive fuel prices can eat up any profit, machinery is so prohibitively expensive that some farmers are going out of business due to just this one issue, and there is only one local place for farmers to sell their crops at a controlled price. Add to that, the average farmer pays 51-53% of his income in taxes. Sounds like communism, doesn’t it?
So if you want to know something about the farming business, don’t be snookered by the skewed words of some journalist or copy editor who is following the orders of the newspaper manager. Please seriously consider who actually owns mainstream media, including newspapers, in this country and what they want you to think and feel. Instead, go talk to some farmers, talk to the fertilizer plant and distributor managers. Talk to the people who are actually in the business and fully understand the problems and risks.
And again, I’m sorry for the losses of your family and friends. I wish them well and much success in a speedy recovery from this tragedy.