were going to have to retreat and wait for reinforcements.
Payne zipped up his coat and began to walk over to the north side of the fire, intending to relay the team’s decision to any firemen in that area. He was almost there at 7:51, when his memory of the incident ends.
The explosion registered 2.1 on the Richter scale. Occurring in two blasts, a millisecond apart, it provided the detonating power of 15,000 to 20,000 pounds of TNT. The fire had ignited the ammonium nitrate. As chunks of concrete, burning wood, and shredded panels of metal flew a half mile in every direction, like mutated bullets, a tumultuous shock punched through every house in the area. A 600-pound mass of concrete soared 450 yards and crashed through the roof of the West Rest Haven nursing home. Twisted, ripped sheets of metal landed on lawns, streets, and fields. Burning fragments caught houses on fire. All that was left of the plant was a crater 93 feet wide and 10 feet deep.
The 93-foot-by-10-foot crater left by the explosion at the fertilizer plant. Photograph by Brian Ficke.
Just about everybody within 45 miles felt the blast. Ten-year-old Hannah Hlavenka, who had been standing on her porch, saw her front yard ripple like a small wave as her sister and mother, who had been near the street, were tossed back about fifteen feet. As Erica Smith felt the boom, she dove over her son to protect him from the falling ceiling. Jean Maler wondered if she was experiencing an earthquake. Bryan Anderson, a restaurant owner who was driving his nine-year-old son home from catechism class, was right in front of the West Terrace Apartments when the country music station they were listening to went silent, replaced by a gentle swishing sound just before all the glass from his windshield and side windows was sucked in toward him and his son, as if the two were magnetic pincushions.
West’s EMS director, George Smith, who, like his students, had been attempting to evacuate the area, ran to the EMS helicopter. His face streaked with blood, he used the satellite radio to request assistance from all fire trucks, ambulances, urban search-and-rescue teams, police, and Department of Public Safety troopers within a hundred-mile radius. Other responders also radioed in. “Y’all have anybody available, I am requesting you. They have firefighters down,” said a female dispatcher. “Firefighters down. Again, there has been an explosion. There are firefighters down.”
Wines had been about two hundred yards from the plant when it blew. Though an ambulance’s doors had caved in not far from him, he himself was unaffected, as if protected by a fortuitous, if mystifying, cocoon of air. The blast didn’t even knock him down. Wines stood for a second as the fireball morphed into a giant mushroom cloud above him. Then, running toward the smoke, he saw injured firemen, like ghosts in a fog. The first was Mitchell, who was leaning against a damaged vehicle, shrapnel in his back. Next was Nors Sr., walking in a daze, covered in dirt and bleeding from the ears. “Are you all right?” Wines asked, but Nors motioned that he couldn’t hear anything. A minute later, Wines came across David Maler, whose T-shirt had been ripped off by the force, leaving only the collar around his neck. His pants looked as if someone had taken a pair of scissors and cut them up the seams.
Payne was lying unconscious near a large white plastic tank, which had been dented in by his body, when Wines’s wife and son, who’d sped to the scene with many of their neighbors, found him. He had literally been blown out of his boots, and his coat, still zipped up, looked as if it had been torn apart by a shotgun blast. As the two helped Payne up, he was bleeding from both ears, his teeth were chipped, and his chest and arm were aching. He was talking, though he doesn’t remember that now, as an ambulance picked him up and took him to an area hospital. Other firefighters at the scene had suffered similar injuries: retina damage, busted eardrums, broken bones, lacerations—and those were just the most obvious problems.
As rescue teams and more locals arrived, Wines got to work. Miraculously, Maler was well enough to help him, and the two men, plus a few others, worked to lift injured bystanders onto backboards and carry them to the nearest road. Then, looking for more backboards, Wines headed to the football field, where he’d heard a triage unit had been set up. By this time, however, word was spreading that the unstable chemicals at the plant might cause another explosion. “We’re not letting anybody else back there,” someone told Wines when he got to the field, referring to the area around the plant. “Y’all need to get out.”
In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, a great many of West’s residents rushed not away from the fertilizer plant but toward it. One of those was Rose Ann Morris, West Rest Haven’s administrator. As the city’s warning sirens blared their high-pitched notes, she hopped into the car with her husband, her son, and his fiancée and swerved around the twisted metal that lay strewn across the asphalt, determined to get to the nursing home and her elderly charges. The sun was setting, and they could see all the wrecked homes—blasted windows, bricks tumbling off the sides, roofs crushed. Most of the power had gone out, and soon only the headlights from vehicles and the occasional house fire would illuminate the area.
When Morris and her family finally got to the nursing home, she stood and gaped at the red-brick building for a moment. The gray-shingled roof had collapsed like wet paper, and the windows had shattered. Morris had known most of the 130 residents her whole life; they’d been customers at her parents’ grocery store when she was growing up, and they’d visited with her at church