And I heard someone report that there are something like 200 of these fertilizer plants in Texas alone, most of them located in or near smaller towns like West, TX. And they're in Texas for two basic reasons, first, the primary raw ingredients are natural gas, which Texas has lot of, and nitrogen which can be extracted from the air outside the building. The second reason is because Texas is one the 'friendliest' states when it comes to regulating these sorts of businesses. For example, any company with 10 employees or less is exempt from regular safety inspections irrespective of what sort of business they're in (which is also why there are something like 200 of these plants around the state, most of them were intentionally set-up as small operations so as to stay under the minimum employee headcount limit). And while this facility never disclosed to DHS the amount of finished material that they had in storage, whenever anyone has tried to make inquiries about exactly how much of this stuff was stored there at any particular moment, or apparently at any one of those 200 similar plants, the response has always been that for 'national security' reasons they are not allowed to disclose that sort of information to the public.
I suspect that this will NOT be the last time we see something like this happening somewhere in Texas...
OCU
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