‘We don’t seem to learn’: Beirut explosion echoes Texas tragedy
AUSTIN, Texas — The staggering videos from the Lebanese capital are grimly familiar to Tommy Muska thousands of miles away in Texas: a towering blast, a thundering explosion and shock waves demolishing buildings with horrifying speed.
It is what the mayor of West, Texas, lived seven years ago when one of the deadliest fertilizer plant explosions in U.S. history partly leveled his town.
On Wednesday, Muska also couldn’t shake a familiar feeling — that yet again, no lessons will be learned.
“I don’t know what people were thinking about storing that stuff,” Muska said Wednesday. He was a volunteer firefighter at the time of the West explosion.
The 2013 disaster at the West Fertilizer Co. was a fraction of the size of Tuesday’s explosion at Beirut’s port that authorities say killed at least 135 people and wounded about 5,000. Both blasts involved massive stockpiles of ammonium nitrate, a common but highly explosive chemical, and swift allegations that negligence and weak government oversight were to blame.
Few significant crackdowns on chemical storage came in the wake of the West explosion, which killed 15 people. President Donald Trump scaled back industrial safety and disaster regulations enacted in response to the tragedy in Texas.
In Texas, authorities suspected arson, but no arrests have been made.
The West explosion had the force of a small earthquake. It flattened homes in a five-block radius and destroyed a nursing home where residents, some in wheelchairs, were trapped in rubble. Ten of those killed in the blast were firefighters or first responders.
“We don’t seem to learn that chemical is deadly,” Muska said. “I feel for those people in Beirut, I surely do. It brought back a lot of memories.“
Last year, the Trump administration scaled back chemical safety measures that included ending a requirement that plants provide members of the public information about chemical risks upon request. Chemical manufacturers had pushed for the changes.
The Obama-era Chemical Disaster Rule is one of several rules or proposals meant to lessen the risks of major, possibly high-casualty industrial disasters that have been weakened under Trump. Others include stripping a Nuclear Regulatory Commission proposed rule that would have required nuclear plants to greatly harden their facilities against the kind of natural disasters that struck the plant in Fukushima, Japan.
Other steps cut proposed safety requirements for offshore rigs after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, and allowed shipment of liquefied natural gas by rail despite criticism from several states, firefighters and the National Transportation Safety Board.
The Environmental Protection Agency, which has trimmed scores of environmental and public health protections that the Trump administration sees as unfriendly to business, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday about the rollback.
At the time, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the weakening of the proposed Chemical Disaster Rule would save $88 million a year in compliance costs. Wheeler said the administration’s move “addresses emergency responders’ longstanding concerns and maintains important public safety measures” while saving money.