by Jessica Luther, a proud Texan who can also be found at her own blog, Speaker's Corner in the ATX, and blazing trails of righteous fury on Twitter, among other places. This piece originally appeared at her home blog.
[Content Note: Explosion; images of destruction; injury; death; racism; disablism; regionalism.]
On Wednesday of last week, between the Boston Marathon bombing on Monday afternoon and the violent police chase for the Tsarnaev brothers through Watertown, Massachusetts on Thursday evening, a fertilizer plant explosion happened in the central Texas town of West.
Background from a piece I wrote at Austinist (updated with correct numbers of the dead):
Just before 8:00pm last Wednesday evening, a fertilizer plant in the small central Texas community of West exploded. It had been burning for at least 20 minutes and volunteer firefighters from the town were on site trying to put out the blaze. Suddenly hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate combusted, creating such a massive explosion that people heard the blast 50 miles away. The explosion left a 22-foot-deep crater at the site. It tore through neighboring buildings, demolishing an apartment complex and a nursing home, and destroying 150 homes in only a few seconds of time. In a town of 2800, roughly 8% of the entire population was either injured or killed with 15 people dying (12 of them first responders) and nearly 200 injured.
There has been very little coverage of the explosion, especially in comparison to the non-stop, wall-to-wall coverage of the Boston bombings. This despite the fact that West killed 5 times as many people, and many of those first responders, and injured roughly the same number of people injured in Boston. National media has been relatively silent. And I mean relatively:
Mike Elk has done good coverage,
All In With Chris has covered it,
CNN has a small part of their homepage dedicated to West.
But it has mainly been local reporting in
Waco,
Dallas,
Austin, and
Houston that has shed light on what happened last Wednesday evening, who was harmed, and why things weren't handled earlier. Kudos to local news.
Theories about why this is the case (culled from many conversations with many smart people on Twitter):
1) West is about the greed of capitalism and we just don't have a good narrative in this country to talk about that. If we want to seriously talk about what happened in West, we have to talk about a lot of things people just don't want to discuss:
de-regulation of industry,
failure of oversight, workplace safety (again,
Mike Elk is amazing on this particular issue). All of these topics are part of our country's current and on-going obsession with "free market labor practices" that leave much of regulation, oversight, and workplace safety to the owners of these plants, the very people who make more money when they walk the dangerous line between profit and explosion. For example, we'd have to admit openly that
13 people die on the job every day in the US and that most of those deaths go unnoticed and, in fact, are seen as collateral of an otherwise successful industrial, political, and economic systemic.
Terrorism, on the other hand, especially any that we can tie to Islam, has a built-in narrative of "The Other" onto which we can all immediately latch. This was most obvious when the identities of the two bombers were released on Friday and the mainstream media took to calling them "ethnic Chechens," focusing mainly on their ties to that particularly restless part of Russia and very little on the 10 years they spent living in the US in the post-9/11 era.
Are Chechens Really White? became a valid question, one that pushed on the easy narrative of "Muslim bombers = not American, not us" but one that has not made many inroads in the national media.
Mike Elk at the Washington Post:
Aaron Albright, who worked on failed mine safety legislation in the wake of the Upper Big Branch mine as an aide to Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), joked on Twitter that the media opted to focus almost exclusively on the Boston bombings because the two stories were like "CSI/Mission Impossible vs. [a] PBS documentary." The story of alleged terrorists with Chechen links seems far more exotic and threatening than does the story of a workplace disaster that would have been preventable if the company followed the rules.
Yet, death in the workplace is a much more real possibility for almost all Americans than is death at the hands of a terrorist. In 2011, 4,609 Americans were killed in workplace accidents while only 17 Americans died at the hands of terrorists — about the same number as were crushed to death by their televisions or furniture. One could argue that terrorists get more attention because they intentionally aim to kill people, but disasters like at Upper Big Branch are also the result of companies violating workplace safety laws.
This is related to telling the stories of Others. When the story is about capitalism and greed, it's harder to pinpoint a single person and if we do, then we may not like what we learn.
Aleksander Chan points out how little we have talked about the owner of the Fertilizer plant, Donald Adair:
Out of focus for much of the proceedings so far has been the plant's parent company, Adair Grain. That stands to change and very quickly as lawsuits will likely aim to name the company and its owner, Donald Adair, as defendants in lawsuits. News reports have depicted an unexpected swell of support for Grain, with Reuters penning this story about how the town isn't holding a grudge against him.
We know almost every detail about the Tsarnaev brothers' lives and next to nothing about the man who heads a company that just destroyed a huge part of a town, killed first responders and residents, and has left many in the community with injuries that they will deal with for the rest of their lives. I could, if pushed to, probably even pick the mother of the Tsarnaev brothers out of a lineup because her face has been all over the internet and TV.
What does Donald Adair look like? I could not begin to say. I cannot find an image of him anywhere online.
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
If you are in the US, contact ![screencap of a Donald Trump tweet reading: '@kristinaoakes: @realDonaldTrump No, you're overrated.' By who, a moron lile [sic] you!](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v642/shakespeares_sister/shakes6/trumptweet.jpg)
