Editors' Notebook

OMAHA (DTN) -- As I blogged some weeks ago, DTN will continue to examine the effects of the West Fertilizer Co. warehouse explosion in Texas.

This week, our DTN Staff Reporter Todd Neeley reports on how widespread ammonium nitrate (AN) use is, and more specifically on how much of the product is stored in various states. (Go to http://bit.ly/… currently in DTN top stories )

It proved a complicated task, and a touchy one as well, for many reasons.

Reporting on fertilizer sites, in a post-Homeland Security world, can be seen by some as the equivalent of doing the legwork for terrorists. One of the side stories that came to light following the West, Texas, situation is that the official reporting on where various fertilizers are kept varies widely across the states.

Following the West, Texas, disaster, as Todd reports, some states have thrown open their books for the world to see. Others have become, at least from our perspective, ever more cautious about the information revealed, particularly regarding ammonium.

Common sense can create arguments for either path, caution and openness, so we approached the subject with a great deal of care.

Once Todd gathered a list of storage locations, he used satellite mapping services on the Internet with the most recent images they make public to get a feel for the surroundings around where some AN storage facilities are located.

I'm sure it comes as no surprise to most readers that Todd had no trouble discovering "would-be-Wests" as he began to match storage permits with satellite imagery. Ag retail businesses are a cornerstone in most rural towns, and even in cases where they once were on the edge of town, civilization often has grown up around them. It's a rural fact of life. In most cases it's a point of pride.

The alternative to that is a town that didn't grow but instead faded into obscurity during the past three or four decades. We're all familiar with those situations, too.

Now, I've been through hundreds of rural U.S. towns in 30 years covering agriculture. I've lived near several that are not that different from the layout at West. Still, it's chilling to peer down -- courtesy of Google Earth -- at random sites from above and see just how close houses and schools and church academies and other high-population buildings are to major storehouses of one very explosive fertilizer. In the short time he spent comparing storage permits to addresses and map locations, Todd found many situations where, if they had been the site of the fire and fertilizer explosion, the loss of life could have been many times worse.

We're not including those actual locations, nor any recognizable details about them, by choice. It's not our intention to scare, or provoke fear, or to be accused of helping would-be terrorists.

It would be just as irresponsible, though, to pretend such situations didn't exist. This brings me to my greatest concern about the West situation: that any lessons learned or precautionary reactions are already in danger of falling through the cracks. In general, public discourse on the disaster is lost in the flurry of other crises, from Boston bombings to Oklahoma tornadoes to the IRS-Tea Party debacle. Even in ag circles, it's lost out to farm bill debates and volunteer genetically-engineered wheat plants.

The West investigation goes on, and should some great revelation come from it, perhaps that will reignite the national conversation -- or at least the rural one -- around hazardous product storage. Looking at those satellite images, I shudder to think of the consequences if we forget about the issue once again.

To see our complete ongoing coverage of the West, Texas, explosion aftermath and what it might mean to farmers and the fertilizer industry, please see our DTN/The Progressive Farmer In-Depth site at http://bit.ly/… .

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

(CZ)

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