picnics. “Are they all dead?” she wondered now. Entering through a blown-out double window in the dining room, she began to wade through giant broken slabs of drywall and the piles of insulation that had fallen like gray stuffing on the tables, chairs, and floors. Her daughter, Christina, arrived at the home a few minutes later and navigated her way to a room where a resident named Johnnie Sinkule was sitting on a caved-in hospital bed. “Can you make that noise stop?” he asked, pointing to the bed alarm. She took the alarm and chucked it at the wall. The alarm fell silent. “I guess that’ll work too,” he said.
Just behind the nursing home, in the West Assisted Living Facility, part-time attendant Cindy Webre was pulling herself off the floor. She didn’t remember being thrown. All the lights in the building had gone out, save for a blinking red alarm in the hallway that emitted a shrill, intermittent blast, and she could barely see through the smoke. Her colleague had been knocked unconscious, and Webre realized that all eleven residents were depending on her to get out. She didn’t think she had the energy to help. She stood for a moment, considering her next move. Then she heard the voice of her father, who’d died just a year earlier. “You’re okay,” he told her. “Now get them out one at a time.” Webre began walking from room to room, searching for the residents, who were covered in glass and drywall.
After a while, two men outside ran up to an empty window frame near her and shouted, “Are you okay?” Webre thought this was a crazy question. “Nobody’s okay,” she shouted over the alarm. Then she felt a wave of hope. Help was coming. Within thirty minutes, other West citizens—teenagers, groups of friends, couples—had swarmed the area, rushing in through the windows to pull residents out of both the nursing home and the assisted living facility, wrapping the elderly with sheets and blankets to stop their bleeding and protect them from the broken glass. They loaded the injured into trucks, and when there were no trucks, they pushed the victims in wheelchairs.
They headed for the football field, to the triage operation. There, under the stadium lights, away from the fire and smoke, nurses and doctors assessed head injuries, broken bones, major cuts, eyes lacerated by flying glass, and, in one case, a woman’s half-blown-off ankle. Ambulance after ambulance rolled in to take the injured away to the closest hospitals in neighboring towns.
Brian Uptmor, a former professional firefighter, also found his way to the football field. He’d been en route to the fire when the plant had exploded. During his efforts to help the victims, he’d spotted Chilo Rodriguez, his brother Buck’s employee, with a gash across his entire back, and he had searched for an empty ambulance to put Rodriguez in. “Chilo, you gotta go, buddy,” Uptmor told him. But Rodriguez was in a daze. “Tell Buck he needs to move my truck,” he replied. Uptmor figured Rodriguez was in shock. His words made no sense: not only was the truck trivial under the circumstances, but Buck wouldn’t have been called to help with the fire—he wasn’t on the volunteer roster. Nonetheless, Uptmor had a horrible feeling. He called his brother’s cellphone as he headed to the field, wondering why he didn’t pick up. Then, like Wines, Uptmor heard the rumor of another possible explosion. Workers began to urge everyone to go to the south part of town. “Head for the community center,” people were saying.
Around 9:30, after searching for stranded tenants in the West Terrace Apartments, Wines caught a ride to the fire station, where most of the volunteers had gathered. Exhausted, stunned, covered in sweat and dirt, they pulled off their gear, convening in the garage. Some guys sank into chairs or leaned against the walls; others chugged bottles of water from the refrigerator. Desperately, they compared stories to map out everyone’s whereabouts: who had been seen walking around, who had been swept up by an ambulance. They knew whose vehicles were parked out near the garage entrance, still unclaimed: Joey Pustejovsky’s red pickup, Douglas Snokhous’s older gray-and-black pickup, Robert Snokhous’s and Morris Bridges’s taupe sedans. They also knew whose families were calling, asking, “Have you seen—?” or “Do you know where—?” These were the hardest questions to hear, and the men had no answers. They didn’t know.
An aerial view of the remains of the West Terrace Apartments on April 18, the day after the explosion. AP Photo | Smiley N. Pool.
The names of the casualties didn’t trickle out until two days later, on Friday night. When Kirk Wines visited Robby Payne in the hospital, Payne asked about the other responders. As Wines started to tell him who had died, Payne hung his head and closed his eyes, and Wines didn’t continue. Fifteen people had perished as a result of the fertilizer plant explosion. Joey Pustejovsky, Morris Bridges, Douglas and Robert Snokhous, and Cody Dragoo had died at the scene. So had many who weren’t West volunteer firefighters: Dallas fire captain Luckey Harris; EMS students and area fire department volunteers Perry Calvin, Jerry Chapman, Cyrus Reed, and Kevin Sanders; and civilians Jimmy Matus and Buck Uptmor had all died trying to help. (Matus and Uptmor would later be designated honorary West firemen.) Just beyond the plant site, the explosion had claimed the lives of two of Erica Smith’s neighbors—Judith Monroe, whom Smith knew as Miss Judy, and Mariano Saldivar—as well as a nursing home resident who died shortly afterward, 96-year-old Adolph Lander. Every person in West lost someone he knew.
It took a couple of days for workers to be certain of the count. With the threat of another explosion, they had to wait to comb the area, and then when they did, they had to make sure they covered every inch. McLennan County sheriff Parnell McNamara, who had seen some horrific