Roger Wicker (R) of Mississippi and President Obama. On Wednesday, moreover, a Mississippi man was arrested in relation to a series of ricin-laced letters to Sen. “My friend’s staying with me right now because her house was destroyed, everything blown out.”īy signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy. “The plant’s on the other end of the town and my house shook, yes, it did, it shook my house,” said Ms. Local officials said several volunteer firemen were inside the fertilizer plant when the tank exploded.

Her son, a volunteer firefighter, suffered several broken bones in the blast and remained in the hospital on Thursday morning, she said. They were able to evacuate most of a retirement home near the plant before the explosion.Īmong the injured is the son of Jonny Payne, proprietor of a local funeral home. West Mayor Tommy Muska described the blast as “like a nuclear bomb … big old mushroom cloud,” and McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara likened the scene to a “war zone.” Authorities on Thursday morning are still conducting house-to-house searches. But the search and rescue operation could yield as many as 60 more casualties, authorities feared.

So far, authorities have counted 160 injuries and several dead. With the sun just coming up over the Texas prairies, it’s too early to know the full extent of the destruction. Almost as soon as firefighters arrived to battle a major fire at a large fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas, on Wednesday night, a large tank of ammonia blew “like a nuclear bomb,” injuring more than 100 people and killing and hurting several first responders, including volunteer firefighters.

House of payne firestorm