scenes in his long career, later said he had difficulty erasing the images from his mind. “Never saw anything like it in my life,” he said. The night after the blast, at around 10:00, an honor guard of firemen, policemen, and state fire marshals formed to salute the dead as their bodies were brought out from the plant’s wreckage one at a time. It took hours. “They’d go down and bring one back and take about fifteen minutes before they brought the next one,” Wines said. “We didn’t know who they were. They wouldn’t identify them to us. But we kind of knew.”
On Friday afternoon, Governor Rick Perry and some other officials held a press conference in West at a cattle auction barn, where Perry answered questions about policy and regulation—broad questions that weren’t foremost in the minds of most residents—be fore Mayor Muska was given the microphone. Visibly worn from the long hours of stress and no sleep, he answered questions flatly. After a reporter asked him to recount the night, he said his fire department pager had gone off and he’d driven his pickup to the fire. “I noticed there was a big crowd, so I went by the high school and saw that side of the fire. I got out of my car, started walking toward the fire. About a block and a half out, my hat flew off. A split second later— boom,” he recalled. “You don’t want my phrase of what I said.”
Another reporter asked how it felt to have experienced such an event. “Devastating,” he said. “I’ve been a member of the fire department for twenty-six years. These guys are my friends. One of them was my city secretary. He had access to our Facebook page, which we can’t get into because that was his job. I talked to him every day. And now he’s not here.”
The funerals began the Wednesday after the explosion and continued almost daily for a week and a half. Payne’s business, the Aderhold Funeral Home, organized many of the services while Payne was recovering. The first memorial, honoring Harris, was held at St. Mary’s, chosen for being the biggest church in town. (Harris attended the nondenominational High Point Church, in Waco.) Even so, the sanctuary couldn’t contain the thousand-some people who came to pay him tribute, including the volunteer fire department, whose members took up several pews. Firefighters from Harris’s force in Dallas, dressed in blue uniforms, filled at least a quarter of the church, while the overflow of mourners stood outside, indifferent to the cold front that had blown in. “When the cameras are gone and the news media leave, people will forget,” retired Dallas Fire-Rescue chaplain Denny Burris said in his eulogy. “But not us. Not us.”
Of the services that followed, most were held in West; a few took place in the surrounding communities, and a joint memorial service for the first responders was held at Baylor University, attended by President Barack Obama. In funeral after funeral, families and survivors shared stories about their lost loved ones. How Dragoo had left little notes for his wife whenever he went out of town— I miss you, I love you —so she would find them when she got home from work. How Douglas Snokhous had taken his step-grandkids for rides in the fire truck, and how his brother, Robert, had loved his wife so much that he married her twice, even though they were never divorced. How Matus had once bought a saddle at a fundraiser despite not owning a horse, and how Bridges, who usually ran straight to a fire, had turned around that day to pick up his son and say, “Daddy loves you. I’ll be right back.” How Uptmor, a cowboy at heart, had trained his daughter’s horses, and how he’d coached his son’s baseball teams and jumped at any chance to help someone out. How Pustejovsky had always had a smile, showing a dimple in his left cheek. “He was the only one that was able to keep me in line and to show me that I needed to be more sympathetic, more loving, more caring,” his mother, Carolyn, said in a memorial service video. “I’m so proud of my son, to be able to go out there, to save people’s lives, and to sacrifice his own,” she continued. “Joey, rest in peace. And take care, sweet son. I love you.”
“We’re so lucky” became the common refrain in later weeks. Some thirty tons of ammonium nitrate had exploded, but soon afterward it was discovered that an additional twenty to thirty tons had not. One hundred more tons, found in a nearby railcar that had blown off the tracks, were also intact. No toxic gas had leaked from the anhydrous ammonia tanks, as the firefighters had feared. Furthermore, the accident had taken place when classes at the high school and intermediate school were out. “Can you imagine if this had happened during the day?” residents asked one another.
No one, perhaps, felt luckier than the first responders who had survived. Sitting at each funeral, Wines replayed the events in his mind. “If I had been there right when the dispatch went off . . . ,” he said later, trailing off. “If I had had my bunker gear at home, like I do sometimes . . .” Thinking about the event scared Eddie Hykel; he couldn’t get his two buddies Dragoo and Robert Snokhous out of his mind. Payne, who was one of the firemen closest to the explosion who hadn’t died, also reflected on his fate. “An inch one way or an inch another way and I think my life would have ended,” he said.
Kirk Wines outside the Old Corner Store. Portrait by Sarah Wilson.
Across town, daily conversations turned to God and faith and the reason any of us are here in the first place. Stevie Vanek had been having a beer with McLennan County justice