On April 17, 2013, a 60-ton stockpile of fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate (FGAN) exploded at the West Fertilizer Company (WFC) in the middle of downtown West, Texas. The fire and explosion killed 15 people—12 twelve emergency responders and 3 members of the community—caused injuries to 260 more people who required medical treatment, and damaged more than 150 buildings off-site. One of the key recommendations to come out of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board’s (CSB) investigation of the incident is to improve emergency planning and response capabilities.
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It’s not a new recommendation; the CSB has often recommended that improved emergency planning and response could save lives in incidents like this one. Despite this, emergency responders continue to suffer preventable injuries and fatalities. As a result, the CSB has added “emergency planning and response” to its list of most-wanted safety improvements.
First on the Scene
To date, 12 CSB investigations and 46 resulting recommendations are aimed to address deficiencies found in a community’s, facility’s, or emergency responder’s response to an incident at a chemical facility. The CSB’s recommendations department determined that the majority of CSB’s recommendations on this issue can be categorized in the following areas:
- Training for emergency responders, including hazardous materials training. In particular, the CSB discovered that there are no standardized training requirements that apply to volunteer firefighters like the ones who responded to the emergency in West. In particular, the firefighters were not required to have minimal training in how to respond to fire involving hazardous materials. If your facility is covered by a volunteer department rather than a paid professional department, it may lack the training and equipment required to respond to an incident at your facility.
- Local emergency planning and community response plans and teams. FGAN is listed as a hazardous material by the U.S. Department of Transportation and is therefore subject to OSHA’s hazardous waste operations and emergency response (HAZWOPER) requirements for emergency response planning. The employer’s HAZWOPER plan should have addressed preemergency planning and coordination with outside parties, personnel roles, lines of authority, training and communication, emergency recognition and prevention, safe distances and places of refuge, site security and control, evacuation routes and procedures, decontamination, and emergency medical treatment and first aid. However, the WFC never developed an emergency response plan.
- Use of community notification systems. In any facility with potentially explosive chemicals, there should be evacuation protocols and a local emergency plan that emphasizes immediate notification to emergency responders and the community at the first sign of fire, which should be practiced regularly. The CSB investigation of the WFC incident found that no immediate evacuation at the first sign of fire occurred, in part because no prepared emergency plan addressed response specific to an incident at the WFC warehouse. This situation left emergency responders and the West community unaware of the urgent need to evacuate. If there had been an immediate evacuation once the fire was detected at the WFC, the number of fatalities and injuries likely would have been lower.
- Use of an incident command system and the National Incident Management System. Multiple responders to the WFC fire were trained and certified in the National Incident Management System (NIMS) process, but none of them formally assumed the position of Incident Commander (IC). The IC is responsible for conducting and coordinating an incident command system (ICS). In the absence of leadership, there was no critical assessment of conditions and no coordinated response. As a result, the firefighters immediately advanced against the fire without considering the possibility of the explosion that killed twelve of them plus three citizen volunteers.
- Conducting emergency response exercises. WFC’s 2012 Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) Tier II report documented the FGAN on-site. Despite this, the West volunteer fire department (VFD) did not conduct drills and exercises at the WFC facility before the 2013 fire and explosion.
- Information sharing between facilities, emergency responders, and the community. Critically important information obtained in previous FGAN-related fires and explosions was not shared with volunteer fire departments in Texas, including the West VFD. Had those previous lessons been applied in West, the firefighters and emergency personnel who responded to the incident might have better understood the risks associated with FGAN-related fire.
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