![]() ![]() The judge kept gabbing, but then the dispatcher called through his radio: “Structure fire at the West Fertilizer plant.” At that, Stevie broke away. Next door, Stevie Vanek was having a beer with the justice of the peace when his pager started buzzing. Bryan called his wife at their bluffside home overlooking the town, and he asked her to step outside and see what was happening. “Look at all that smoke, Dad,” the 9-year-old said. Looked like his fellow volunteer firefighters would need help.īryan Anderson, who owned the local pizza joint, was at the Exxon, on the way home with son Kaden from religious-ed class. Jake Sulak pulled the white iron gates shut and climbed into his pickup. The town gravedigger was locking up the cemetery when he saw smoke on the horizon. The West Fertilizer plant burns before it exploded on April 17, 2013. “I mean, I’ve never seen destruction like that.” “It was literally the worst thing I have ever seen,” said Mike Westerfield, a 37-year veteran of the Waco Fire Department. It was as if a twister had come through town carrying an atomic bomb. ![]() It injured almost 10 percent of West’s population, registered as a magnitude-2.1 tremor and flung debris as far as 2½ miles away. The April 17 explosion was roughly five times the size of the blast of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which was also generated by ammonium nitrate. West was a far larger event, though the circumstances were murkier. “Boston Strong” became a national mantra. There were obvious villains and emerging heroes, and the subsequent manhunt transfixed the nation. On April 15, a small but vicious pair of pressure-cooker bombs ripped through the finish-line crowd at the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring 264. West, Tex., is the one you didn’t pay as much attention to. Two American cities were wracked by explosions during the third week of April 2013. (Photos by Cooper Neill and Lawrence Jenkins for The Washington Post) ‘What makes this country great’ The town, though, has already figured it out.įour members, past and present, of West’s volunteer fire department: Jake Sulak, top left, has dug graves for 35 years Stevie Vanek, top right, volunteers with the Knights of Columbus Judy Knapek is the town’s first and only female firefighter and Tommy Muska is - just like his father was - the mayor and an insurance salesman. Investigators have spent 4½ years and millions of dollars trying to determine what happened that day in West. “There had to be something protecting us.” “You cannot tell me that there is not a higher being that knows Wayne’s painting couldn’t be replaced,” she would say later. In another room, two paintings still hung side by side: a generic store-bought landscape and a cousin’s hand-rendered lighthouse. At Holecek’s home, a bedroom wall was wiped clean of its decor except for a single wooden cross. Mary’s for weekday Mass, or Bible study at the Baptist church, or the track meet near Texas A&M.īlessings abounded in the Texas town of West, population 2,800, on that April day in 2013 when the fertilizer plant caught fire and its ammonium nitrate detonated - killing 15, injuring 252 and damaging or destroying 500 buildings.Īt a house 1,000 feet from the plant, everything collapsed except for a cabinet with glass figurines of angels, intact and unmoved. ![]() But because it was a Wednesday, many were a safe distance away: at St. If it had been a Tuesday or Thursday, much of the town would have been at the sports fields for home games, right in the blast radius. If it had happened earlier, schoolchildren would have been sliced by flying glass and trapped in ruined classrooms. If the blast happened a little later, the old folks at the rest home would have been tucked into bed, vulnerable as the ceilings came down. If Misty Kaska hadn’t found a coupon for dinner at the Panda Express in Waco that Wednesday evening, she and her husband would have been in their house when it crumpled and ignited. But its sloping steel bulk was in just the right place, at just the right time, and it shielded her from the concussion that shattered her home. If her son hadn’t stowed that damn ’66 Chevrolet Impala in her garage, Jeanette Holecek would have died the day her town exploded. ![]()
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