Summary of presentation on the West, Texas HazMat disaster as given at the April 2015 Region VIII RISC meeting for The Link newsletter.
“When the EMS director passed me on the highway doing 90, I knew we had a problem,” recalls Emergency Manager Frank Patterson of McLennan County, Texas.
Patterson was home mowing his grass on the afternoon of April 17, 2013, when he learned there was a fire in nearby West, Texas. He thought he was responding to a routine event, but soon found himself the incident commander of an industrial explosion that made international news. Fifteen people died, most of them firefighters, when ammonium nitrate in the West Fertilizer Company plant exploded about 7:50 p.m. The explosion left a crater 93 feet wide and 10 feet deep. Debris from the plant was found 2 ½ miles away. Evacuation teams took 262 people to hospitals, many injured by glass from windows or by aggregate from the nearby railroad bed that was embedded in their bodies by the blast.
“Driving down the street was a surreal experience,” he recalled. “People were coming at us dazed and injured. I still didn’t realize how bad it was. Then I saw the windows blown out and doors blown open.”
The plant was built 65 years ago. The town had since built up to the plant, and a nursing home, apartment complex and children’s playground were all near it.
The first call about the fire took almost three minutes, as the dispatcher tried to match the address given to her data. The problem was that the road changed name three times within one mile.
Patterson set the initial priorities: search and rescue; stabilization, triage and transport of patients; hazardous materials; fire suppression; scene control and staging. Just setting the priorities helped settle the responders. “NIMS works,” he told the crowd. “I know we all sit in class and say, ‘How much longer?’ But it works.”
Controlling the responders, however, was a problem. A total of 120 different agencies showed up, many self-dispatching. As people found where the command post was, they crowded around. Briefings were held every half hour at one point, and Patterson found he could not see those briefing from just 6-8 feet away because of the crowding. He got calls from Washington agencies who wanted a briefing, which he had no time to give. (Later he realized the calls were driven by concerns about terrorism – the Boston Marathon bombing had occurred just two days before.)
Part of that problem was controlling responders who wanted to take control: “If people don’t know what’s happening, they assume it’s not happening. They would decide to start searching somewhere on their own… We would try to establish order and someone else would give a counter command. The doctors who showed up wanted to treat people on site, instead of doing triage and sending them to a hospital…. We used troopers to bring order – they have no sense of humor and they carry a gun. That worked well for us.”
Volunteers will show up for no-notice events as well. “We could leverage them, or we could push them away and make them mad. We said if they can push a wheelchair [to evacuate the nursing home residents], we’ll use ‘em.”
The command staff needed an order to restrict air access, so that media helicopters could be ordered away and medical evacuation helicopters brought in.
It took 3 ½ hours before the final patients were transported. “That was the first time I could breathe,” Patterson said. “That is the weight of the world. That is an extremely heavy burden.”
Evacuation was much simpler: “When an explosion happens, people leave.”
Patterson had one agency handle the scene control so that they had good internal communication.
Some of the federal agencies initially did not communicate well with the incident command staff, until Patterson had them start sending people to the meetings.
He did not include the Public Health agency early and later regretted that. When the agency did come in, it set up a Family Assistance Center to help with the grieving families, crisis counselling, locating missing people, handling calls about residents from far away, etc.
An animal control agency set up a shelter for pets, and the US Department of Agriculture set up a facility for large animals. A problem erupted, however, from rescue groups that showed up, wanted to be in charge and when denied, “They go to the media and say there is no plan. Then you’re behind in explaining you do have a plan.”
Dignitaries, he said, “show up at the scene for photo ops, but work stops.”
An anhydrous ammonia tank was leaking, and the Environmental Protection Agency said it would take ten days to remove it safely. However, Union Pacific wanted use of its rail line restored and they removed the tank quickly. Lesson: “Don’t ever take the first answer as the final answer.”
Donations eventually filled six warehouses. When the material was moved from the local fairgrounds to the warehouses, rumors began that the incident commanders or FEMA “were taking their stuff.” Those had to be addressed.
He advises that emergency managers be careful about labelling an event as potentially terrorist-related. Insurance companies do not pay for acts of terrorism, so they will not pay their policyholders as long as there is some possibility an event was a criminal act.
Patterson says his wife told him early he needed to get a handle on social media. He ignored her and lived to regret it. Rumors spread such as the dead totaling 70 and that Fort Worth might have to evacuate. But getting a media spokesperson proved difficult. The local responders left were overwhelmed, and other agencies did not want their spokespeople to talk about local issues.
One late-night media call resulted in a story falsely saying Patterson did not even know about his responsibility under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act to have a plan for dealing with chemicals in the community. The story was picked up by Associated Press and went worldwide. The result included ten wide-ranging Freedom of Information requests, which preoccupied Patterson’s staff for some time. His summary: “Emergency managers do not survive large incidents like this in Texas. I survived because I had kept all documentation.”
Among the lessons learned, per Patterson’s summary, were these:
- Have both a public relations person on the command staff and a public information officer. “There will be a lot of second-guessing, very soon.”
- Have Incident Management Teams who can stay more than a few days.
- Have contingency plans for technological tools. Radio communications may get wiped out. The team on this explosion never used WebEOC on the incident.
- Plan for mass casualties, including for documentation of body recovery.
- When planning a memorial service, include all related groups.
- Plan for management of volunteers and donation.
- Appoint a scribe to record phone calls, conversations, timelines, etc. for each member of the command and general staff.
- Find a way to turn off self-deployments.
- Isolate the command post from the general public.
- Disseminate information to all responders.
- Keep the incident under control of the local jurisdiction.
His last word: “People do not rise to the level of their training, but sink to their level of comfort.”