Texan plant is just a coincidence, unfortunately it's the worse place to have a fire start, and that is a fertilizer plant, all that fertilizer packed into silos is one large bomb ready to go off. And it did exactly that with huge effect.
The Shockwave alone must have been equivalent to a high yield nuclear warhead.
Texans sure love their explosions, one guy detonated his excess fertilizer a year or two ago in his back yard, and it caused such a shockwave that it fooled the local earthquake monitor into thinking a huge earthquake happened. Also he was picked up by the homeland security as a terrorist attempt. Yeah.
No, PEPCON was bigger and is equally as bad a place to have a fire start, if not worse. (PEPCON was several KILOtons. Nuclear weapons are in the order of MEGAtons)
PEPCON had 10.5 million pounds of ammonium perchlorate (or AP) stored in one location, in open containers. AP is a main component in solid rocket fuel. By itself, it is harmless, but contaminate it, and/or give it an ignition source, and you're looking at something that is by weight, 55% O2, the air we breathe is by weight, 29% O2. So that should give you an idea how well it burns.
So, that got going, that then started using itself as fuel, and the aluminum bins and poly barrels provided the two other components found in SRBs (solid rocket boosters), rubber and aluminium.
When that got to exploding, it got to exploding with a 3.5 on the Richter scale, the earlier explosions at PEPCON measured a 3 on the same scale and when all was said and done, it left a crater fifteen feet deep.
Lesson learned? Don't store so much potentially explosive stuff in one place. I just hope the fertilizer industry changes its own procedures after this.
These disasters and "coincidences" won't stop. They will only grow more and more frequent.
I'm still waiting for an explanation on why the professionally trained sniffer dogs were reacting to explosives and no necessary actions were taken to evacuate people.
Do you have any evidence of that, other than what the track coach said? Surely more people must have heard it, no?