Because yeah, fertilizer bombs have killed as many

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Ammonium nitrate sold by ton as U.S. regulation is stymied


http://www.dallasnews.com/investigations/2013...tymied.ece

Ammonium nitrate fertilizer is not allowed in Afghanistan. The country banned it three years ago because of its use in bombs against NATO soldiers.

The fertilizer’s explosive nature has led to similar prohibitions elsewhere, including China, Colombia, Germany, Ireland and the Philippines.

But in the United States, you can purchase it pure by the ton. Then you can store it in a wooden warehouse with no sprinkler system, a few hundred feet from a middle school.

That’s what happened in the Central Texas farming town of West, where an explosion destroyed nearby schools, houses and a nursing home. The blast killed 15 people, including 12 first responders. Several hundred more suffered injuries, some as severe as broken bones, ruptured organs and blindness.

For more than a decade, U.S. efforts to tighten controls over ammonium nitrate fertilizer have repeatedly failed, bogged down by bureaucratic gridlock and industry resistance.

Regulations approved years ago remain unenforced and unfinished. Mere talk of safer substitutes has been blocked by those with profits at stake.

In fact, just 13 days before the West disaster, the only two remaining U.S. manufacturers of ammonium nitrate fertilizer pleaded for Washington’s help to preserve their $300 million annual market. Company executives bemoaned the “terrible toll” of regulation and the “pressure” of increased competition from nonexplosive substitutes.

“We would like to be making and selling more ammonium nitrate,” one executive said at a federal trade hearing.

After the April 17 explosion in West, President Barack Obama singled out ammonium nitrate in an executive order directing the federal government to improve chemical oversight. The order renewed discussion of safer substitutes.

But company officials argue that farmers still need ammonium nitrate, especially for certain crops and in hot, dry states like Texas.
“The arguments that you’re hearing — that it’s too expensive, there are too many small businesses that would be put out of business, that it would add to the cost of farmers — those are generic excuses that I’ve heard time in and time out around a whole bunch of industrial processes,” said Gerald Poje, a former member of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, the federal agency that investigates chemical accidents.

“We like to continue doing what we’ve done until somebody forces us to do something differently,” Poje said, “and then the world accommodates to that change.”

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