Texas explosion

norm

Hundreds of people were likely to have been injured in a fiery explosion on Wednesday night at a fertiliser plant near Waco, Texas, that damaged or destroyed numerous buildings including a nursing home, authorities said.

The blast was reported at about 8pm (1am GMT on Thursday) in West, a town of 2,700 people about 80 miles (130km) south of Dallas and 20 miles (32km) north of Waco.


A spokesman for the Texas department of public safety, DL Wilson, told Reuters the blast had probably caused "hundreds of casualties" and damaged many homes.

He added that a nearby nursing home collapsed from the explosion and people were believed trapped inside.

A Reuters reporter observed that a middle school and several homes in the area appeared to have been severely burned.

More than 100 people injured in the blast and fire were being taken to Hillcrest Baptist Medical Centre in Waco, said the vice-president of hospital operations, David Argueta.

The Hillcrest chief executive, Glenn Robinson, told CNN that the hospital was seeing "everything from orthopaedic injuries to patients that are experiencing serious blood loss".

The Texas governor, Rick Perry, issued a statement saying his office had "mobilised state resources to help local authorities" deal with the incident.

be warned..this video gets intense
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROrpKx3a ... e=youtu.be

blackredyellow

This is going to be horrific. Tomorrow morning's pictures are going to look like Hiroshima.

Buildings flattened for miles around.

mbangel10

This is horrible. A nursing home and a middle school are on fire too.

This video looks like it was taken about 1/4 mile away or so... very scary and I hope they are ok.

http://youtu.be/ROrpKx3aIjA

mfc2006

I'm at a loss.....

lukin2006

I hope the person who was in the vehicle is alright ... they kept saying they couldn't hear.

SPEEDY MCCREADY

Good Lord!

dimitrispearljam

no words....horrible...the voice of the little girl is heartbreaking

shep

word this morning on the news is that the fatalities are numbered around 180 people...

insane.

I hate to say this, but I really hope this was the fault of an industrial accident and no one purposefully caused this...

seems like the entire USA has gone haywire in the last week....

dimitrispearljam

shep wrote:

I hate to say this, but I really hope this was the fault of an industrial accident and no one purposefully caused this...

....

seriously man...i thought the same too..better be an accident..even sound crazy..oh boy ,,its madness..

Black Diamond

Did someone forget to make a sacrifice to the gods this past weekend?

I can't believe what I am seeing on the news... My heart goes out to this town..

javis el errante

let's hope ii is just a momentary sequel from the blast...

Indifference71

Wow. That video is insane. This has not been a good week.

STAYSEA

Texas has had a very strange year.

RKCNDY

mfc2006 wrote:

I'm at a loss.....

I know the explosion was close to Waco...was that close to where you lived?

So very sad.

drivingrl

Morning after footage: http://www.wfaa.com/video?id=203634481&sec=552897&ref=rcvidmod

What a sad thing. :( Who doesn't stop in West between Dallas and Austin? It's a tradition!

mfc2006

RKCNDY wrote:

mfc2006 wrote:

I'm at a loss.....

I know the explosion was close to Waco...was that close to where you lived?

So very sad.

Yeah, Lisa...it was. We have quite a few friends in West. Some of which we haven't heard from yet. I know that the cell towers were damaged....

I want this week to end. :(

drivingrl

mfc2006 wrote:

RKCNDY wrote:

mfc2006 wrote:

I'm at a loss.....

I know the explosion was close to Waco...was that close to where you lived?

So very sad.

Yeah, Lisa...it was. We have quite a few friends in West. Some of which we haven't heard from yet. I know that the cell towers were damaged....

Oh no. :( Praying for them, and for the first responders unaccounted for. :(

RKCNDY

mfc2006 wrote:

RKCNDY wrote:

mfc2006 wrote:

I'm at a loss.....

I know the explosion was close to Waco...was that close to where you lived?

So very sad.

Yeah, Lisa...it was. We have quite a few friends in West. Some of which we haven't heard from yet. I know that the cell towers were damaged....

I want this week to end. :(

{{{HUGS}}} to you Matt, hopefully you will be able to contact them soon. :(

Who Princess

drivingrl wrote:

Morning after footage: http://www.wfaa.com/video?id=203634481&sec=552897&ref=rcvidmod

What a sad thing. :( Who doesn't stop in West between Dallas and Austin? It's a tradition!

Exactly! Stop to get gas and buy some of those awesome kolaches!

For those who watched the video and heard the little girl saying that she can't hear, on the news this morning they said that she recovered her hearing a short time later. Still, what a traumatic thing to experience.

I seldom think about how dangerous the firefighters and EMTs jobs are. This is such a terrible reminder of what they face all the time. So very sad for the lives lost.

STAYSEA

does anyone remember this day?

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/08/us/ga ... tures.html

It's happened a few times since then. I flipped out. I thought the world was ending.

Everywhere in this country has experienced serious disasters/events this week?

I mailed three packages today to Illinois and Ohio. I didn't know those areas where flooded till I got back home.

I'm really at a loss for words.

Seems everything around me is going down like a turd in a well.

STAYSEA

mfc2006 wrote:

RKCNDY wrote:

mfc2006 wrote:

I'm at a loss.....

I know the explosion was close to Waco...was that close to where you lived?

So very sad.

Yeah, Lisa...it was. We have quite a few friends in West. Some of which we haven't heard from yet. I know that the cell towers were damaged....

I want this week to end. :(

I'm so sad also about West. Please let us know if you hear anything.
This is all I've found...

"7:00 P.M.: Dallas Fire-Rescue captain Kenny Harris confirmed dead in the West Fertilizer Co. explosion. Harris lived in West and worked as a firefighter at Station 30 in Dallas.

KVUE (http://bit.ly/17sYRBV) reports that Harris was not a volunteer firefighter for West but responded when he heard news of the fire that broke out Wednesday night at the plant. Harris, 52, was a father of three grown sons.

6:45 P.M.: An official death toll has not yet been released, but the Los Angeles Times reports (http://lat.ms/11mb2yE) that Mayor Tommy Muska said 35 to 40 people are believed to be dead in a massive fertilizer plant explosion "because they are unaccounted for and still missing."

"We are out there searching the rubble, looking in each and every house. We are trying to locate each and every citizen," Mayor Tommy Muska said in a telephone interview.

Muska said he arrived at the count of 35 to 40 dead because all other residents and first-responders in the area have been identified. Among those who were missing and believed dead, he said, were as many as six firefighters and four emergency medical technicians."

norm

this guy is either the luckiest or unluckiest guy ever...either way, i'm staying far away from him

People keep asking Joe Berti if he feels unlucky.

A bomb exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon seconds after Berti finished the race. Two days later, he was in his home state of Texas when he saw a fertilizer plant explode near Waco.

"I was just like, 'I can't believe this!'" said Berti, who said he had never witnessed an explosion before. Then he thought: "I just want to get out of here and get away from all these explosions."

But Berti, as it turns out, is far from unlucky. Instead, he feels fortunate. He left both tragedies unscathed, while members of his running group and his wife — who was closer to the Boston explosion than he was — were also unhurt.

"It's a miracle," he said in an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday. "People keep saying, 'Don't you feel unlucky?' and I was actually the opposite — saying not only do I not feel unlucky, but I feel blessed that my wife could be 10 yards from the explosion and not have a scratch."

The bombings in Boston, which happened about 10 seconds apart at the finish line of Monday's marathon, killed three people and left more than 180 wounded. In West, Texas, which is near Waco, a fertilizer plant exploded on Wednesday, killing at least five people, injuring more than 160, and leveling homes, apartments and a school.

"We're grateful that God has been merciful to us," said Berti's wife, Amy. "We are just praying for the people who were so much less fortunate than we were."

Berti's road to the Boston marathon started just a couple months ago, when he decided to run with Champions4Children, a charity that helps kids with rare or undiagnosed disorders and their families. He was one of eight Austin-area runners who ran the marathon with that group. Each ran for a sick child or "training partner," who tracked his or her runner's marathon progress from home.

During the last four miles, the 43-year-old Berti, who wore bib number 25472, felt his body shutting down, and his pace slowed. But he was running for his partner Drew, and he vowed to finish.

"I had just run to the finish line and like 30 seconds later I heard the first explosion, and then turned around and saw the smoke," he said. "I knew immediately that it was a bomb ... Then the second explosion occurred and I saw a wave of people running."

At that point, he said, he was so exhausted he couldn't run anymore. He worried about getting caught in a stampede. He was concerned about members of his running group who were behind him. He also thought about his wife, whom he was unable to reach and was probably wondering where he was. He told himself she was fine, because she was supposed to be at a restaurant.

"But then, I was like, 'She never listens to me, and she may have been at the finish line,'" a thought he quickly tried to remove from his mind.

As it turns out, Amy Berti and a friend were just a few yards from the first explosion. She had just taken a picture of Joe, and was heading to the finish line to find him when the bomb went off. She and her friend were both hit by shrapnel. Amy was uninjured, her friend was bruised.

But a woman right next to Amy had her leg torn off from the knee down, and lost all the fingers in her left hand. Amy Berti went to get help, and once that woman was being cared for, Amy's frantic search for her husband began.

His cellphone battery died. He wasn't on the bus. He wasn't in the medical tents.

"I had just watched him cross where that bomb was, so I didn't know if he made it through and I couldn't find him," she said. "I started to freak out a little bit."

After about an hour, the couple reunited at their hotel, both of them OK. They left Boston Tuesday morning and returned to Austin, with every hope of getting back to life as normal with their two girls, ages 8 and 11.

Joe Berti went back to work. On Wednesday, he had a daylong meeting in Dallas, followed by a museum tour. He was heading home on Interstate 35 and nearing Waco Wednesday night when he saw black smoke up ahead to his left. As he drove closer, he saw — and felt — his second explosion in two days.

"You've got to be kidding!" he remembers thinking. He described the giant fireball as a massive force that shook his car. He said it looked like pictures of nuclear explosions that he has seen on television.

He didn't know what he had just witnessed — but he pulled over and took a picture.

"My next reaction was to get out of there because something fell on the top of my car — some debris or something fell from the sky," he said.

As black smoke billowed over the highway in front of him, Berti held his breath and drove through it. After a few attempts, he was able to reach his wife — sparing her another round of worry.

"I'm like, 'Honey, what is with your luck? Why are you in all of these places?" Amy Berti said. When a reporter suggested that Joe should stay home for a while, she joked, "We need to keep him moving. Maybe he just needs to stand in an open field."
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/marathon ... -disasters

dimitrispearljam

norm wrote:

this guy is either the luckiest or unluckiest guy ever...either way, i'm staying far away from him

i agree!