of the peace David Pareya when his pager went off. Vanek said he had to go, but Pareya continued talking. “Just let me finish telling you this,” he kept saying. “And one more thing—” Fifteen minutes later, when Vanek finally got to the fire station, he hopped on the last fire truck headed out. He was near the football field when the plant blew. “If David hadn’t kept me those ten minutes, I’d have been with them, and I’d be dead,” Vanek said. “I firmly believe that when I was born, the day was set when I was going to go. That’s my belief. And it just wasn’t my time. That’s the only thing I can figure.”
“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” Mayor Muska told a packed crowd one night after evening mass at St. Mary’s. It was three days after the blast, and everyone wanted to know when they could get back into their homes and find what was salvageable. Muska understood; his own house was only a few blocks from the plant site. But areas on the north side of town were still cordoned off, he explained, as public safety officials assessed which buildings were safe for entry. “I’m not going to lie or paint a rosy picture,” he said. “But as soon as we get there, we’re gonna get there. And we are going to get there together, I’m positive of that. I know that.” He paused. “The one miracle I can tell you about is Jimma Holecek’s chickens survived.” Quiet laughter swept through the weary crowd, and Muska continued. “They’re at the humane society in Waco, Texas. So there is a God.” Grateful, perhaps, for the exhausted mayor’s stamina, one person began to clap. The sound was loud and vigorous, and soon the applause was spreading from pew to pew.
Like many others, West’s volunteer firemen were jettisoning their work demands to concentrate on the city. Muska, for example, was one of three insurance agents in West, and incoming claims piled up in his office as he spent his days making pressing decisions as mayor. Stevie Vanek put his glass business on hold so he could focus as mayor pro tem on the needs at city hall. George Nors Jr. took time off from his job at a Waco bottling plant to fill in for his father at the station until George Nors Sr. had recovered from his injuries. Since the townspeople couldn’t do without prescriptions, Kirk Wines went back to work at the Old Corner Drug Store, where he used donations that had begun to come in to cover the cost of the medicine for displaced citizens. In a town that prided itself on its strength and resourcefulness, he found that many of his patrons resisted the kindness, trying to pay him anyway. “These people don’t get the blessing of giving if you don’t take it,” he chided them.
George Nors Sr. outside West's firehouse. Portrait by Sarah Wilson.
In fact, people in West were struggling with outside attention of all sorts. Reporters and TV crews had descended on the town, and residents couldn’t seem to walk two steps without being interviewed. Just as alien, initially, were the generous offers that poured in from relief organizations. The Friday after the blast, a Red Cross official called the emergency-management team in charge of West because no one was showing up at the shelters that the Red Cross had set up for citizens who had lost their homes. “Where are your people?” the official asked. A representative for the emergency team explained that neighbors, family, and friends had taken them all in. “People are just like that here,” Vanek later explained.
Finally, a week after the disaster, the city began opening up the affected neighborhoods. While residents dug through the wreckage, Red Cross volunteers drove around delivering water, soda, food, paper filter masks, and plastic gloves. Insurance adjusters wanted estimates on the items lost, a puzzle to anyone who has ever had to make a claim. How do you put a price on a damaged old photo of a loved one? Or ostrich boots that had been broken in just right? Animal-lover Jimma Holecek, who was a carpenter, was elated to find his wooden rosary among the rubble of his house. Jean Maler was teased by her daughters and friends as they dug through insulation to find and sort her enormous shoe and purse collections. Sharon Hlavenka was able to retrieve her driver’s license, jewelry, phone, and iPad from her house, and her children, like many others who knew their homes would be razed, spray-painted messages on the front brick as a final goodbye. “ Na zdraví ” (“Cheers”), read one house. “We are West,” read another. The Hlavenka kids sprayed “God is big enough” in large letters on their home, above the shrubs; between a shattered window and the front door, which had been blown off its hinges, they wrote, “For Sale Very Nice.”
By the second Saturday after the explosion, everyone had cleared out of their homes, leaving huge trash bags on the street, and the bulldozing had begun. Paramedic Kevin Smith was the first to watch his house be demolished. The air still smelled sweet, like burned metal, as he stood at the curb with his arms folded. “They said it would take about a day,” he said. It was hard for him to look at the damaged brick house and not relive the explosion that had shaken him in his second-story bedroom, where he’d been installing a smoke detector. Prior to the explosion, he and his wife had scheduled a Child Protective Services inspection so they could proceed with an adoption request. Now his family plans were on hold, replaced by meetings with architects.
As Smith watched a yellow excavator claw at his home, his next-door neighbor, Brian Kaska, walked over in an army-green T-shirt and sunglasses. He was an engineer who had just celebrated his baby girl’s first birthday. Kaska’s house