like 4 times as many people died in the Texas blast

[Toddowen]

At least the Boston story has come to a conclusion. So that's good news, even though my wish of the one of the bombers luring as many members of the press into his house for an exclusive interview only to detonate them all into pieces smaller than your average sized chicken nugget.


Oh well....there's always the next show.

[Diego in Seattle]

16 dead, 60 unaccounted for
and nobody gives a shit


guess no one cares about Texas

Nope.

[The Seer]

Gotta love the media.

AP says no more "illegal" tags on illegal aliens. Today's Daily News has two front page stories about Boston and the word "muslim" is no where to be found.

Fuck those censoring leftist cunts.

[War Wagon]

true enough though that the media treated the hunt for one scared 19 year old like he was Osama Bin Laden, Hitler and Saddam Hussein all rolled into one.

Fertilizer plants exploding with the force of 2.2 magnitude earthquake felt 50 miles away are a dime a dozen.

[MgoBlue-LightSpecial]

Texans are isolationists. They have a sense of superiority over everyone else and like to think of themselves as their own country. You get what you ask for.

[R-Jack]

My disdain for both regions and their inhabitants allows me to be objective when I say the bombing is a bigger story.

A terrorist attack at a sporting event is always going to be bigger than a fertilizer explosion regardless of body count.

......and no one gives a shit about Texas.

[Dr_Phibes]

I didn't follow this. When the fertiliser eventually lands, Texas will have a lovely yard.

[Left Seater]

A terrorist attack at a sporting event is always going to be bigger than a fertilizer explosion regardless of body count.

......and no one gives a shit about Texas.

Agreed a terrorist attack is a bigger deal than an industrial accident.

Texans are isolationists. They have a sense of superiority over everyone else and like to think of themselves as their own country. You get what you ask for.

Always nice for someone who doesn't know what they are talking about to speak for me. We don't have a sense of superiority, I witnessed that first hand in New York/ New England and SoCal. See also anyone who uses the term flyover country. The vast majority doesn't think of Texas as its own country, rather we think locally first and look to ourselves, our neighbors, our cities, first before looking for something larger to solve it for us.

Say what you want about no one caring about Texas, but you sure care about tax money we send to DC.

[R-Jack]

Put the banjo minow back in the tackle box folks. We got the best Leftybait right here.

[Mikey]

Keep your damned Federal regulations the fuck out of Texas.

Sent help when a chemical plant explodes, though.

[Mace]

[Derron]

Somebody is spending too much time on Facebook.

[Toddowen]

You all know why Boston was the bigger story.

Because it was being fucking groomed, to draw and quarter on every newspaper front page and network channel, the 2nd amendment rights extremist who planted the bombs.

The headlines, special in-depth breaking news coverage, political stump shouting geared to ban even the production of plastic water pistols at some point down the road....

The best laid out plans all fouled up by one glitch.


That's OK for them though. This was just a test run. They'll be better prepared the next time around.

[mvscal]

You all know why Boston was the bigger story.

Because it was being fucking groomed, to draw and quarter on every newspaper front page and network channel, the 2nd amendment rights extremist who planted the bombs.

The headlines, special in-depth breaking news coverage, political stump shouting geared to ban even the production of plastic water pistols at some point down the road....

The best laid out plans all fouled up by one glitch.


That's OK for them though. This was just a test run. They'll be better prepared the next time around.

I don't doubt that. Lefty wingnuts in the media and elsewhere were creaming in their jeans thinking that they finally got a "teabagger" terrorist act to froth over.

Just look at the resident idiots here.

[Dr_Phibes]

, the 2nd amendment rights extremist who planted the bombs.

You can't blame people for that, finally there was a bomb that actually worked. I haven't heard anything from Boston since those hippies with the Lite-Brites.

It's been nothing but entrapped mental defectives setting fire to their penis on airplanes, mysterious explosive substances that no one's ever heard of that could never actually explode except under laboratory conditions and dimbulbs crashing into airport windows.

If anyone can make a proper bomb, it's a gun nut.

[mvscal]

If anyone can make a proper bomb, it's a gun nut.

Muslims seem to have it down pretty well.

[Roger_the_Shrubber]

I didn't follow this. When the fertiliser eventually lands, Texas will have a lovely yard.

True but within a week there will be a trailer on blocks and the 14 kids in nothing but dirty diapers or just underwear and a nasty dirty t-shirt, along with the 6' 400 lb wife and husband , 5'3'' 130 lbs with less teeth than gollum will turn that grass into a dust bowl within a month.

Just joshing.

[BSmack]

true enough though that the media treated the hunt for one scared 19 year old like he was Osama Bin Laden, Hitler and Saddam Hussein all rolled into one.

Fertilizer plants exploding with the force of 2.2 magnitude earthquake felt 50 miles away are a dime a dozen.

That's nothing, we had a salt mine collapse south of Rochester that generated 3.6 on the Richter Scale.

[Mace]

true enough though that the media treated the hunt for one scared 19 year old like he was Osama Bin Laden, Hitler and Saddam Hussein all rolled into one.

Fertilizer plants exploding with the force of 2.2 magnitude earthquake felt 50 miles away are a dime a dozen.

That's nothing, we had a salt mine collapse south of Rochester that generated 3.6 on the Richter Scale.

You're right, Bri. Wags registers a 2.2 on the Richter by banging his head against the wall whenever he hears anything about gay marriage.

[Mikey]

<insert Rumplewife joke here>

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

What if fat people organised in some militant, extremist fashion and waged a terror campaign against their "slender oppressors"?

[Mikey]

Now that some of the Boston hoopla has died down maybe there will be some attention focused on West, Texas.

Not likely to go too well for the anti-regulation crowd, though. 270 tons of ammonium nitrate, unreported.

Texas fertilizer company didn't heed disclosure rules before blast

(Reuters) - The fertilizer plant that exploded on Wednesday, obliterating part of a small Texas town and killing at least 14 people, had last year been storing 1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Yet a person familiar with DHS operations said the company that owns the plant, West Fertilizer, did not tell the agency about the potentially explosive fertilizer as it is required to do, leaving one of the principal regulators of ammonium nitrate - which can also be used in bomb making - unaware of any danger there.

Fertilizer plants and depots must report to the DHS when they hold 400 lb (180 kg) or more of the substance. Filings this year with the Texas Department of State Health Services, which weren't shared with DHS, show the plant had 270 tons of it on hand last year.

A U.S. congressman and several safety experts called into question on Friday whether incomplete disclosure or regulatory gridlock may have contributed to the disaster.

"It seems this manufacturer was willfully off the grid," Rep. Bennie Thompson, (D-MS), ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement. "This facility was known to have chemicals well above the threshold amount to be regulated under the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Act (CFATS), yet we understand that DHS did not even know the plant existed until it blew up."

Company officials did not return repeated calls seeking comment on its handling of chemicals and reporting practices. Late on Friday, plant owner Donald Adair released a general statement expressing sorrow over the incident but saying West Fertilizer would have little further comment while it cooperated with investigators to try to determine what happened.

"This tragedy will continue to hurt deeply for generations to come," Adair said in the statement.

Failure to report significant volumes of hazardous chemicals at a site can lead the DHS to fine or shut down fertilizer operations, a person familiar with the agency's monitoring regime said. Though the DHS has the authority to carry out spot inspections at facilities, it has a small budget for that and only a "small number" of field auditors, the person said.

Firms are responsible for self reporting the volumes of ammonium nitrate and other volatile chemicals they hold to the DHS, which then helps measure plant risks and devise security and safety plans based on them.

Since the agency never received any so-called top-screen report from West Fertilizer, the facility was not regulated or monitored by the DHS under its CFAT standards, largely designed to prevent sabotage of sites and to keep chemicals from falling into criminal hands.

The DHS focuses "specifically on enhancing security to reduce the risk of terrorism at certain high-risk chemical facilities," said agency spokesman Peter Boogaard. "The West Fertilizer Co. facility in West, Texas is not currently regulated under the CFATS program."

The West Fertilizer facility was subject to other reporting, permitting and safety programs, spread across at least seven state and federal agencies, a patchwork of regulation that critics say makes it difficult to ensure thorough oversight.

An expert in chemical safety standards said the two major federal government programs that are supposed to ensure chemical safety in industry - led by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) - do not regulate the handling or storage of ammonium nitrate. That task falls largely to the DHS and the local and state agencies that oversee emergency planning and response.

More than 4,000 sites nationwide are subject to the DHS program.

"This shows that the enforcement routine has to be more robust, on local, state and federal levels," said the expert, Sam Mannan, director of process safety center at Texas A&M University. "If information is not shared with agencies, which appears to have happened here, then the regulations won't work."

HODGEPODGE OF REGULATION

Chemical safety experts and local officials suspect this week's blast was caused when ammonium nitrate was set ablaze. Authorities suspect the disaster was an industrial accident, but haven't ruled out other possibilities.

The fertilizer is considered safe when stored properly, but can explode at high temperatures and when it reacts with other substances.

"I strongly believe that if the proper safeguards were in place, as are at thousands of (DHS) CFATS-regulated plants across the country, the loss of life and destruction could have been far less extensive," said Rep. Thompson.

A blaze was reported shortly before a massive explosion leveled dozens of homes and blew out an apartment building.

A U-Haul truck packed with the substance mixed with fuel oil exploded to raze the Oklahoma federal building in 1995. Another liquid gas fertilizer kept on the West Fertilizer site, anhydrous ammonia, is subject to DHS reporting and can explode under extreme heat.

Wednesday's blast heightens concerns that regulations governing ammonium nitrate and other chemicals - present in at least 6,000 depots and plants in farming states across the country - are insufficient. The facilities serve farmers in rural areas that typically lack stringent land zoning controls, many of the facilities sit near residential areas.

Apart from the DHS, the West Fertilizer site was subject to a hodgepodge of regulation by the EPA, OSHA, the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Texas Department of State Health Services, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Office of the Texas State Chemist.

But the material is exempt from some mainstays of U.S. chemicals safety programs. For instance, the EPA's Risk Management Program (RMP) requires companies to submit plans describing their handling and storage of certain hazardous chemicals. Ammonium nitrate is not among the chemicals that must be reported.

In its RMP filings, West Fertilizer reported on its storage of anhydrous ammonia and said that it did not expect a fire or explosion to affect the facility, even in a worst-case scenario. And it had not installed safeguards such as blast walls around the plant.

A separate EPA program, known as Tier II, requires reporting of ammonium nitrate and other hazardous chemicals stored above certain quantities. Tier II reports are submitted to local fire departments and emergency planning and response groups to help them plan for and respond to chemical disasters. In Texas, the reports are collected by the Department of State Health Services. Over the last seven years, according to reports West Fertilizer filed, 2012 was the only time the company stored ammonium nitrate at the facility.

It reported having 270 tons on site.

"That's just a god awful amount of ammonium nitrate," said Bryan Haywood, the owner of a hazardous chemical consulting firm in Milford, Ohio. "If they were doing that, I would hope they would have gotten outside help."

In response to a request from Reuters, Haywood, who has been a safety engineer for 17 years, reviewed West Fertilizer's Tier II sheets from the last six years. He said he found several items that should have triggered the attention of local emergency planning authorities - most notably the sudden appearance of a large amount of ammonium nitrate in 2012.

"As a former HAZMAT coordinator, that would have been a red flag for me," said Haywood, referring to hazardous materials.

(Additional reporting by Anna Driver in Houston, Timothy Gardner and Ayesha Rascoe in Washington, and Selam Gebrekidan and Michael Pell in New York; Editing by Mary Milliken and Robert Birsel)

[R-Jack]

What if fat people organised in some militant, extremist fashion and waged a terror campaign against their "slender oppressors"?

Yeah, because tactical decision making and achieving set goals are the calling card of the obese.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

Yeah, because tactical decision making and achieving set goals are the calling card of the obese.

One day, the scales will tip in their favour:




...and the world will tremble at their approach...

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

Pressure cookers will be employed...


...to make dinner.

[mvscal]

Now that some of the Boston hoopla has died down maybe there will be some attention focused on West, Texas.

Not likely to go too well for the anti-regulation crowd, though. 270 tons of ammonium nitrate, unreported.

It was reported just not to Homeland Security. Try reading your own article next time, dumbass.

Apart from the DHS, the West Fertilizer site was subject to a hodgepodge of regulation by the EPA, OSHA, the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Texas Department of State Health Services, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Office of the Texas State Chemist.

A separate EPA program, known as Tier II, requires reporting of ammonium nitrate and other hazardous chemicals stored above certain quantities. Tier II reports are submitted to local fire departments and emergency planning and response groups to help them plan for and respond to chemical disasters. In Texas, the reports are collected by the Department of State Health Services. Over the last seven years, according to reports West Fertilizer filed, 2012 was the only time the company stored ammonium nitrate at the facility.

It reported having 270 tons on site.

Yeah, let's make another reporting requirement. That will simplify the process. Clearly reporting the same information to seven different agencies and programs isn't enough. Fuck it, let's just create an whole new agency. Lord knows we don't have enough useless bureaucrats sucking at the taxpayers tits.

Idiot.

[War Wagon]

What if fat people organised in some militant, extremist fashion and waged a terror campaign against their "slender oppressors"?

I can outrun Mace and Mikey.

[Left Seater]

As to Mvscal's point, this is all over the news here. this has been all over the news here. The plant apparently called the EPA 14 times asking for help on all the new reporting requirements. They got a form letter saying there was a backlog and any EPA requirements would be put on hold until the EPA responded.

The plant was current with all Texas regulations at the time of the explosion.

Hopefully this can help streamline government reporting regulations and sharing of data between the federal government agencies.

[Mikey]

Hopefully this can help streamline government reporting regulations and sharing of data between the federal government agencies.

Whatt we really need to to is de-fund them and starve them all to death. Then the won't be anything more to worry about.

[mvscal]

Nobody is saying we don't need any regulations, so shove your strawman up your ass.

Apart from the DHS (1), the West Fertilizer site was subject to a hodgepodge of regulation by the EPA (2), OSHA (3), the U.S. Department of Transportation (4), the Texas Department of State Health Services (5), the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (6) and the Office of the Texas State Chemist (7).

A separate EPA program, known as Tier II (8), requires reporting of ammonium nitrate and other hazardous chemicals stored above certain quantities. Tier II reports are submitted to local fire departments and emergency planning and response groups to help them plan for and respond to chemical disasters. In Texas, the reports are collected by the Department of State Health Services. (9)

Does that not strike you as completely ridiculous if not insane? Or is that your idea of good, efficient government?

[mvscal]

Hopefully this can help streamline government reporting regulations and sharing of data between the federal government agencies.

That's what they said just before they created the Department of Homeland Security. No doubt this problem is nothing yet another layer of bureaucracy can't "fix."

[Left Seater]

Another got agency is not what is needed. What is needed is a single reporting point that then disseminates the info.

[mvscal]

Of course that makes perfect sense; however, that would mean a lot less snouts in the trough so it will never happen...well, not before this whole stinking, fucked up mess collapses around our ears anyway.

[LTS TRN 2]

Well gosh, 1-malt, I suppose we need a lot less regulations...and a lot more guns...and much more defense spending...and huge cuts to social security and medicare...right? I mean, that's your seething Tea Bagger mantra, right? And...you are a seething Tea Bagger, right? Let's be clear.

[Dr_Phibes]

Nobody is saying we don't need any regulations, so shove your strawman up your ass.

Apart from the DHS (1), the West Fertilizer site was subject to a hodgepodge of regulation by the EPA (2), OSHA (3), the U.S. Department of Transportation (4), the Texas Department of State Health Services (5), the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (6) and the Office of the Texas State Chemist (7).

A separate EPA program, known as Tier II (8), requires reporting of ammonium nitrate and other hazardous chemicals stored above certain quantities. Tier II reports are submitted to local fire departments and emergency planning and response groups to help them plan for and respond to chemical disasters. In Texas, the reports are collected by the Department of State Health Services. (9)

Does that not strike you as completely ridiculous if not insane? Or is that your idea of good, efficient government?

But here's where it gets confusing, 88 - help me out. State/Federal overlap is a result of duplicating layers, something that comes with state/federal/municipal divisions/rights. When this conflict comes into other arenas, like healthcare - it becomes choice. Duplicating government and regulatory bodies 50 times leads to things like this.

Not being a smartass, I just don't understand it, it's selective, it's inefficient, it's conflicted :?

[Truman]

State/Federal overlap is a result of duplicating layers, something that comes with state/federal/municipal divisions/rights. When this conflict comes into other arenas, like healthcare - it becomes choice. Duplicating government and regulatory bodies 50 times leads to things like this.

Not being a smartass, I just don't understand it, it's selective, it's inefficient, it's conflicted :?

How many years have you been posting on American chat boards, Phibes? Welcome to America. FTR, HALF of us don't understand it either. Christ, you're last sentence would pass as a rallying cry at half-a-hundred Tea Party rallies across the U.S., and could easily be the sig line for every conservative or libertarian on this Board that ever mashed "submit".

[Dr_Phibes]

Long enough to know the solution is the antithesis of the formulation of the question.

I fucking gave up long ago, but it's still interesing.