Editors' Notebook

First of all, our hearts at DTN go out to the families of West, Texas. I know that sounds trite, many say things like that when bad things happen. But many of us in this newsroom have direct familiarity with towns and situations like those of West. Events like this hit close, too close to take lightly.

We have had a team of reporters working on various issues that have been brought up by the West disaster since it occurred. You'll find several running in our Top Stories section and elsewhere on the web and satellite products. (Also available here http://www.dtn.com/… .) There will be many more yet to come that will explore safety and regulatory procedures, fertilizer supplies and the training of rural first-responders, issues on rural zoning and the site location for hazardous products that are key to food and fiber production.

Regulations, rules and property laws are emotionally charged subjects. I'm sure we'll touch a lot of nerves, some positive and some negative, among readers and customers. We don't take that lightly, either.

No subject is more charged than that of the fate of ammonium nitrate, NH4NO3 to chemists, which has become agriculture's equivalent of an AR-15 with a 30-shot clip. In the right situation, in the right hands, each is valuable and to an inventor's eye almost elegant in carrying out the task for which it was designed. In the wrong place, or in the wrong hands, recent history reminds that each can produce horrifying consequences.

As with the so-called assault weapon so hotly debated today, there hasn't been much middle ground in any discussion around ammonium nitrate: there are either staunch defenders or abolitionists.

Divisiveness doesn't lend itself to timely answers, and that is perhaps the most difficult piece of this story to wrap my head around. Years have passed since the Oklahoma City bombing and the concerns raised about ammonium nitrate at that time. As our Chris Clayton has reported, laws to more closely monitor its sales, supported by the fertilizer industry, were passed in 2007 but actual rules remain unfinished six years later.

Time, unfortunately, has a way of making us complacent and forgetful. Either mindset has grave consequences. The Wall Street Journal reported that one of the volunteer firemen killed also was the foreman at the West fertilizer facility, making it likely he knew the fertilizer inventory at that site. Whether he recognized the danger and went ahead, as firefighters do, to vanquish the fire and prevent an explosion, or whether he -- in the rush of the moment -- failed to think about the real danger we may never know. On one level it doesn't matter. Nor does it matter if for some reason ammonium nitrate turns out to not be the chief culprit here. These situations are entirely possible and just as possible in another town today or next week as in West, Texas on April 16.

I also think the ammonium nitrate safety issue got a little lost in the attention so keenly focused on anhydrous ammonia in recent years. Keeping NH3 out of the hands of meth makers, debating the age farm kids need to be to pull tankers on public highways, the worry about health hazards from escaping gases and transportation accidents, those have dominated recent conversations about fertilizer safety.

That focus on anhydrous is vividly brought into perspective if you look at aerial images of the West facility today. I don't in any way mean to diminish the respect one should have for anhydrous ammonia. Yet in the photographs, there sit West's white NH3 storage tanks, basically intact and on their concrete moorings, not 200 feet from the crater that was created by such an incredible blast.

There still is much to learn about what happened at West. We may never know all the pertinent facts. One fact is known. There is no constitutional amendment from which to argue the right to bear NH4NO3.

Greg D. Horstmeier can be reached at greg.horstmeier@telventdtn.com

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