Trauma lingers after deadly Texas blast

Nicole Fallert | Paste BN

April 17, 2013. An explosion at a North Texas fertilizer plant carved a crater in the earth 75 feet across and 8 feet deep. It killed 15 people. Michael Irving was the first police officer to smell the smoke. He initiated evacuations, including of a nearby park, saving dozens of lives. A decade later, Irving is opening up for the first time about the crisis and the lingering effects in the minds of the residents.

👋 Nicole Fallert here, and welcome to Your Week, our newsletter exclusively for Paste BN subscribers (that's you!). This week, we talk with Texas-based Paste BN national correspondent Rick Jervis about his exclusive interview with the West, Texas, police officer who was the first to respond to the explosion a decade ago.

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'I will never be the same person again'

Jervis vividly remembers April 17, 2013, leaving his young daughters and wife at their new home in Austin, Texas, to drive to the town of West. An explosion had just occurred at a fertilizer plant that would become one the biggest industrial explosions in Texas history.

"You could see the fire in the distance," Jervis recalled of his drive into West. "You could see the debris and destruction. The survivors were coming in [to a hotel] and they just had this stunned, traumatized look on their faces. ... You could tell it was something that we didn't usually cover. This was a massive event."

When he arrived at the scene, he tried to speak to as many people affected as possible. He remembers one police officer holding the crowd of reporters back. He would come to know Michael Irving, a law enforcement officer on the scene who was the first to smell smoke, the first official to call in the fire and the first to begin evacuating people in harm’s way.

Ten years later, Jervis is the first reporter Irving has spoken to about the tragedy and his trauma.

On the surface, things in West seem to have improved.

The deadly blast – the equivalent of 30,000 pounds of TNT – prompted the White House and federal agencies to intensify their focus on ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that’s highly combustible and the key culprit in the West blast. Then-President Barack Obama ordered improvements in regulatory rules and traveled to Waco to speak at a memorial for those killed in the explosion.

Legislation has been passed to prevent ammonium nitrate storage within West city limits. Most of the homes destroyed have been replaced with new structures.

But the psychological effects of the explosion are like a "hidden secret" in the mind of the city, the West mayor told Jervis.

"There's still a lot of trauma lingering," Jervis said. It's true for Irving, who has been haunted by memories of that day for years.

“I will never be the same person again,” Irving said in his exclusive interview with Paste BN. “There are parts of me that are just gone.”

And despite superficial reconstruction efforts, Jervis said he believes Americans are no safer than before from ammonium nitrate explosions. The US Chemical Safety Board did a long investigation of the explosion that culminated in 19 recommendations to keep the country safer, but only about half of these have been implemented.

In his reporting, Jervis said he found that despite years of investigative work on the risks these storage sites pose, experts and officials don't feel there's anything that has been done in the last 10 years to make anyone safer.

"It's really scary," he said. "There are a lot of communities and homes built near these facilities."

Jervis also remembers the Boston Marathon bombing had just happened at the time he covered the story in West.

"I remember thinking, 'Who is actually paying attention to this story right now?' with such a big story happening simultaneously," he said, adding that he still feels the reality in West is largely underreported.

Coverage of the situation in West over the past decade is uniquely Paste BN, Jervis said, because readers are getting on-the-ground knowledge from a reporter who has been there since the moment the story started.

"There's reporting you can't get anywhere else," he said of "[Paste BN's] capacity to have correspondents around the country who can cover these stories that are so very important."

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Thank you

Your support of the Paste BN Network means reporters like Jervis can be on the ground telling vital stories. It's important to reflect on even the heaviest news events to remember why these stories matter. I hope you find time to recover and take care this weekend. I'll be seeing you here again soon.

Best wishes,

Nicole Fallert

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