Deadly Explosion Hits Texas Fertiliser Plant – Now a ‘Crime Scene’

UPDATED – This story replaces the one I posted earlier. The big news is this site is now being treated ‘as a crime scene’.

Stephen: I’m not saying there is a definitive link here but this huge fertiliser factory explosion occurred almost 30 years to the day of the Waco massacre of April 19, 1993. However, in light of the Boston Marathon incident taking place on April 15, the day Bostonians call Patriot’s Day (held annually on the third Monday in April and commemorating the battles of Lexington and Concord, which were fought near Boston in 1775), I’ve also listed some other major events from this same week over the years - including the shooting of Abraham Lincoln and the sinking of the Titanic – at the end of this story.

Texas Explosion: Fertiliser Plant Treated as Crime Scene After Up to 15 Die

Apocalyptic scenes near Waco, Texas, as deadly fireball engulfs fertiliser plant and razes dozens of homes

By Rory Carroll in Los Angeles; Sam Jones and agencies, The Guardian – 18 April 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/18/texas-explosion-fertiliser-plant-crime-scene

Up to 15 people are now thought to have been killed and more than 160 injured after a massive explosion and fire tore through a fertiliser plant and razed dozens of homes in a small Texas town on Wednesday night.

Authorities in the town of West, north of Waco, said the blast site was being treated as a crime scene, although they stressed they had no evidence of foul play.

The blast shook the earth and rolled a huge fireball through the town at about 8pm local time, raining burning debris and shrapnel over a five-block radius.

Sergeant William Patrick Swanton of Waco police, who said the death toll was only an estimate as search and rescue operations were still taking place, added there was nothing to suggest the blast was anything other than an industrial accident.

The McLennan county sheriff, Parnell McNamara, said: “I’ve never seen anything like this. It looks like a war zone with all the debris.”

The mayor of West, Tommy Muska, said it was as if a nuclear bomb had been detonated: “Big old mushroom cloud. There are a lot of people that got hurt. There are a lot of people that will not be here tomorrow.”

Muska told Reuters that five or six volunteer firefighters who were among the first on the scene were missing. They had been battling the fire and evacuating nearby residences and a nursing home for about 50 minutes before the blast occurred.

Police estimate that between five and 15 people have been killed, adding that more than 160 are being treated for their injuries at the local hospital as well as at Waco, 18 miles away, and Dallas, 80 miles away.

Units from 30 fire departments brought the blaze at the West Fertiliser Company plant under control by midnight. Fears that a second fertiliser tank might explode receded but authorities continued to evacuate residents amid concern about toxic fumes.

David Argueta, vice-president of operations at Waco’s Hillcrest Baptist medical centre, said staff had treated lacerations and orthopaedic-type injuries. “We are being told that we have seen most of the patients, and it’s now turned into a search-and-rescue operation on scene,” he said.

A spokesman for the Texas department of public safety said a nursing home had collapsed and people were believed trapped inside.

West, located in McLennan county in central Texas, has a population of 2,800. The blast registered as a 2.1-magnitude seismic event and was heard at least 45 miles away. Television pictures showed apocalyptic scenes of fire and smoke from ruined buildings close to the factory.

There was no immediate confirmation on what caused the incident, which followed a bomb attack in Boston, but the US representative Bill Flores, whose district includes West, ruled out foul play. “I would not expect sabotage by any stretch of the imagination,” he told CNN.

A fire at the factory reportedly started at about 6pm. Firefighters and police were tackling the blaze and evacuating residents when the explosion – its fireball captured in dramatic video footage – erupted at about 7pm. Several firefighters and at least one police officer were reported missing.

A teacher, Debby Marak, 58, told Associated Press that after teaching a religion class she noticed plumes of smoke coming from the area across town near the plant, which is near the nursing home. When she drove over to investigate two boys ran towards her screaming that authorities told them to leave because the plant was going to explode. She said she drove about a block before the blast struck. “It was like being in a tornado. Stuff was flying everywhere. It blew out my windshield. It was like the whole earth shook,” Marak said.

Her husband, who was in another part of town when the blast hit, told her a huge fireball rose like “a mushroom cloud”.

Hours later, TV helicopters showed fires still smouldering in the factory and nearby buildings, including what appeared to be a school.

Firefighters expressed concern about anhydrous ammonia, a gas used in fertiliser that can poison and cause severe burns. State troopers in gas masks set up roadblocks and directed traffic away from the scene.

The Red Cross was working with emergency management officials in West to shelter displaced and evacuated residents.

Lydia Zimmerman told the KWTX station that she, her husband and daughter were in their garden in Bynum, 13 miles from West, when they heard multiple blasts. “It sounded like three bombs going off very close to us,” she said.

The explosion came two days before the 20th anniversary of a conflagration in Waco when federal agents ended a siege by storming the compound of David Koresh and his Branch Davidian sect followers, resulting in the deaths of 82 members of the sect and four federal agents.

Other ‘events’ to have occurred in this “week’ over the years:

* April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln died the next morning.

* April 15, 1912, the RMS Titanic sank, carrying 2,200 passengers. The ship had struck an iceberg just before midnight, on April 14.

* April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 students and himself at the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, West Virginia.

* April 19, 1993, events surrounding the siege in Waco, Texas, came to a point. On that day, the compound that housed religious leader David Koresh burned to the ground, 51 days after a shootout erupted when federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents tried to arrest Koresh for stockpiling guns and explosives.

* April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh detonated a massive explosive in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Hundreds of civilians were injured, and 168 people died.

* April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

Fed and Bank of Japan Caused Gold Crash

The upward trend of the great bull market has been broken. The technical damage is brutal. Bank of America expects a further drop to $1,200. Be patient Photo: Alamy

Stephen: I feel this journalist, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, ‘instinctively’ knows what’s ‘going on’ and, although he comes from a ‘traditional’ economic theory base, is deftly bringing his unique perspective to a mainstream audience via his articles and opinion pieces. Note: QE is Quantitative easing, an unconventional monetary policy used by central banks to stimulate the national economy when standard monetary policy has become ineffective.

Commodity prices have been falling since September, culminating in a rout over the past two weeks. That is a classic warning for the global economy.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph, UK – April 17, 2013

http://tinyurl.com/bm5nqm2

It is becoming ever clearer that the roaring boom in global equities since last summer has priced in an economic recovery that does not in fact exist.

The International Monetary Fund has had to nurse down its global growth forecasts yet again. We are still stuck in an old-fashioned trade depression, with pervasive over-capacity in manufacturing plant and a record global savings rate of 25pc of GDP.

German car sales fell 17pc in March. That should puncture the last illusions that Germany is about to pull Europe out of a self-inflicted slump.

As you can see from the chart below, the divergence between stock markets and the Deutsche Bank index of raw materials is astonishing to behold, so like the pattern in early 1929.

Steel has fallen 31pc this year. Brent crude is off 17pc since early February, and copper 15pc.

You have to be careful reading too much into commodities, distorted by China. The time-honoured cycle is a surge of investment that comes on stream at once with a lag. America’s shale drive has turned the gas market upside down, diverting liquefied natural gas to Europe and Asia. Copper output in Chile rose 7pc last year. The crash in the Baltic Dry Index for shipping rates is partly a tale of too many ships.

Yet excess supply does not explain the collapse in gold over the past week. Cyprus may have been an incidental trigger. If the EU-IMF Troika is determined to strong-arm the Cypriots into selling most of their pint-sized holding of 14 tonnes, it may do the same to Portugal when the time comes, and then you are talking about the world’s 14th biggest holding of 382 tonnes.

Bank of America says the gold crash since Friday has already discounted sales of the entire Cypriot, Portuguese and Greek gold reserves combined.

“As we believe additional gold selling in the European periphery is highly unlikely, we find it hard to fully justify the sell-off,” it said.

The central banks of China and the emerging powers bought 535 tonnes last year to escape dollars and euros, the biggest wave of state purchases since 1964. Their strategy is to buy the dips, and they are no fools. The head of China’s reserve manager “SAFE” used to run a US hedge fund.

They won’t try to catch a “falling knife”, prefering to wait until the dust settles. The upward trend of the great bull market has been broken. The technical damage is brutal. Bank of America expects a further drop to $1,200. Be patient.

My view is that the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan “caused” the gold crash. The rest is noise. The Fed assault began in February when it published a paper warning that the longer quantitative easing continues, the harder it will be for the bank to extricate itself.

The report was co-written by former Fed governor Frederic Mishkin, often deemed Ben Bernanke’s “alter ego”. It said the Fed’s capital base could be wiped out “several times” once borrowing costs climb. The window will start shutting by 2014, with trouble then compounding at a “dramatic” pace.

This was a shock. It suggested that the Fed has lost its nerve, and will think long and hard before launching a fresh blitz of money if growth falters.

Then came last week’s Fed Minutes, with hints of tapering off QE earlier that expected. That was the next shock. What they seemed to be saying is that the US economy is groping it way back to normality, that the era of silly money is over, that the dollar will stand tall again.

If that were the case, gold should fall. But it is not the case. The US economy is growing below the Fed’s own “stall speed” indicator. Half a million people fell out of the workforce in March. Retail sales fell in March. So did manufacturing.

The US faces fiscal tightening of 2.5pc of GDP this year, the most since 1946. Ex-labour secretary Robert Reich said the effects have been disguised so far, but a “stealth sequester” is just starting: $51m of grant cuts to Brandeis university; $1m for schools in Syracuse; and so on, the reverse of the stealth stimulus before.

My guess is that the Fed will be forced to row back smartly from its exit talk, but first we must look deflation in the eyes.

As for the Bank of Japan, it had been assumed that the colossal monetary stimulus of Haruhiko Kuroda would revive the yen-carry trade, leaking $1 trillion into world asset markets. But the early evidence is the opposite. Japanese investors brought money home last week.

“Mrs Watanabe” is selling her Kiwi and Aussie bonds to bet on stocks and property at home. And she is selling gold like never before. That too is a shock.

Japan’s “Abenomics” may prove a net drag on the world over coming months. It is exporting deflation through trade effects. This already visible in Korea and China, where soaring wages have eroded competitiveness. “Investors may have forgotten that yen weakness was one of the immediate causes of the 1997 Asian currency crisis and Asia’s subsequent economic collapse,” said Albert Edwards from Societe Generale.

China’s growth rate fell to 7.7pc in the first quarter. It will fall further, though the catch-up boom in the hinterland cities of Chengdu, Chonquing, Changsa and Xi’an may have further to run.

Fitch Ratings says credit has surged from €9 trillion to €23 trillion over the past four years, a rise equal to the entire US banking system. Beijing pumped up loans yet again after its recession scare in the summer, but is gaining less traction. The GDP growth effect of credit has halved. It is the classic sign of an economy sated on debt. China too will have to deleverage.

The world is still in a contained depression. Sliding commodities tell us global money is if anything too tight. “There is a threat of deflation almost everywhere. A lot of central banks will have to follow the Bank of Japan, whatever they say now,” said Lars Christensen form Danske Bank

The era of money printing is young yet. Gold will have its day again.

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