(Associated press image of the mushroom cloud at the fertilizer plant in West, Texas.)
Some maybe-informed people say that the explosion down in West, Texas, a little town of 3,000 people, was the equivalent of a three-kiloton nuclear detonation.
The estimate of casualties is all over the map, and highlights the problems of the vulnerability of infrastructure all over the country. Available evidence suggests this is an industrial accident, enhanced by strong winds, and is neither unprecedented nor of the magnitude of disasters that have happened before. Not that it is any comfort to those who died, nor those who were badly hurt.
The most recent analogy might be the PEPCON disaster in Henderson, Nevada, in 1988. Two died in that one, though the string of explosions injured hundreds. Cause was an errant welding torch, and the inadvertent massive overstock of highly flammable material created by the Challenger disaster. Analysis of the incident suggested the inventory of propellant for the Space Shuttle program that was piling up was the proximate cause.
Nothing will equal- insh’hallah- the magnitude of the explosion in Texas City back in 1947. Over 500 sailors and firemen were literally vaporized as two merchant ships went up in the single most massive explosion in US history.
So lay that against the act of terror in Boston- or don’t. They are not dots that can be connected even indirectly, though there are those who are trying, but the two events are feeding into a very strange brew of coincidence and political polemic. In fact, I have not seen the like of this collective angst- terror letters, rumors of impending terror- for a decade.
Some dots do not connect. Others do. Like everyone else, I am intensely curious to see where these disparate paths are going to lead us.
The one bunch of people I feel a little sorry for are the North Koreans. They worked so hard to get our attention, the information operations campaign so well choreographed, only to see us drop them in a New York second.
It has got to be driving them nuts.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com