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blast in the small town of West, near Waco, and officials expressed fears that toxic fumes could settle over the area. There was also concern that a second fertiliser tank could explode, stoking anxiety in a nation already on edge after the Boston marathon bombings which left three people dead.
The cause of the blast — which destroyed an apartment complex and a nursing home and sent residents fleeing into emergency shelters — was not immediately known.
“It’s like a nuclear bomb went off,” West Mayor Tommy Muska, who is also a volunteer fire-fighter, told CNN of the explosion, which witnesses said sent a huge fireball into the air.
The death toll “is estimated anywhere from five to 15 at this point,” while three area hospitals had treated more than 160 people with varying injuries, Waco police sergeant Patrick Swanton said, warning that the toll could rise further.
Muska said six or seven firefighters were unaccounted for and that around 80 homes had been levelled.
The disaster comes with the United States jittery following Monday’s deadly twin bombings in Boston, and a scare in Washington over mail apparently laced with the poison ricin sent to President Barack Obama and a US senator.
It also came just ahead of the 20th anniversary today of a deadly confrontation in Waco between federal authorities and heavily armed members of a religious group, the Branch Davidians. In apartment complex and a nursing home were destroyed, local residents flooded into emergency shelters, and at least 100 patients were hospitalised following the blast, which US seismologists said had a magnitude of 2.1.
“It exploded just like the Oklahoma City bomb,” Jason Shelton, a clerk at the Best Western Czech Inn in West, told The Dallas Morning News, referring to the 1995 bombing that killed 168 people. I live about a thousand feet from it and it blew my screen door off and my back windows. There’s houses leveled that were right next to it.”
A spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, D.L. Wilson, told reporters house-by-house searches were being conducted in the hunt for victims.
West, with a population of about 2 800 people, is home to a thriving Czech community dating back to the late 1800s, as immigrants settled the American frontier.
In Prague, the foreign ministry said its ambassador to Washington, Petr Gandalovic, was traveling to West to study the possibility of providing aid from his government for the injured and relatives of the victims. — AFP.
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