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The trees were on fire. The gravedigger, still in his truck, thought he was dead until bloodied men came pounding on his window.
Walls of black smoke rolled down streets, past houses ignited by flaming debris. The interstate was a flashing artery of red and blue. Firefighters from other towns descended on West, tried to put out fires at the schools, clambered into the apartment complex to unearth residents buried by crumbled walls. In the ruins of the rest home, townspeople ripped doors off their hinges to use as backboards, piled some residents into the beds of pickup trucks and pushed others down the street in their wheelchairs.
West residents raced around town, shouting over the sirens in search of lost family as evening descended and helicopters circled. The electricity was out everywhere except, miraculously, the football field, which became the triage site.
Misty Kaska had raced back from Panda Express in Waco and, because she is a nurse, went straight for triage. She found plenty of walking wounded, but surprisingly few injuries proportional to the physical violence around her.
This is it? she thought. Where are the missing limbs?
Doreen Strickland, the president of the Abbott Volunteer Fire Department, helped one old man from the rest home into the passenger seat of her fire engine. In the back were a dozen of his fellow residents. He turned to Doreen.
“Am I the grand marshal?” he said in a small, raspy voice.
“And I’m in front of the parade,” he said, lost in his delusion.
“You’re leading the parade,” Doreen said gently, as she piloted the engine around smoking boulders of debris. “You’re a very special person right now.” Turning her head to cry, she rolled down the window for him, and he started waving at armageddon.
Josey Visnovske was in his back yard in south Georgia when his phone buzzed. His boss, asking him to check his email.
Twelve first responders dead. Wanna go to West, Texas?
No, he didn’t. Not really. A former Marine and undercover police officer, Josey joined the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and became a fire investigator. He liked to work a burn site like a puzzle, to sift ashes for answers. But something about his intensity, his compassionate nature, made him a promising “peer responder” — someone who tends to the knotty hurt of emergency personnel who survive a terrible event. It was a calling he resisted. “It wasn’t part of the plan,” he says. But he agreed to go to West as his first deployment as a peer responder.
To his ATF colleagues would fall the task of investigating the cause of the West inferno — a probe that would put a federal team on the scene for 29 days, sorting through obliterated machinery for evidence, conducting 400 interviews, even combing through 300,000 pounds of corn from a demolished silo at the plant. It was one of the largest investigations ever undertaken by the ATF.
The fire caused the explosion.
But what caused the fire?
Josey’s job was more personal. Before he left Georgia for West, he took a handful of quarters and Marine Corps key chains and taped them to a target 100 yards away behind his house. Then he took his bolt-action rifle and, one by one, fired bullets through the objects. He hoped they could be his keys into West: something concrete but personal, a token of his own vulnerability.
He got there two days after the explosion and found a town reeling.
“Don’t mess with ’em now,” Judy Knapek told the stranger wandering into her fire station. The daughter of a West firefighter whose portrait still hung on the wall, Judy saw herself as the protector of the protectors. And her boys were in pain.
They’d just lost five men from their department of 29, including her cousins Robert and Doug Snokhous, and more were in the hospital. In all, about 24 first responders, from West and other jurisdictions, had made it to the scene, and half had died. Some walked away with fractures, a busted eardrum, a concussion; others were carried out in too-small body bags as a bagpiper played “Amazing Grace.” The difference was a matter of inches, of seconds. That was a puzzle far more confounding than the actual fire scene.
Josey made clear that he was there to listen, not investigate. He stayed in West for a week, meeting with responders one-on-one, trying to chip through the town’s stoicism. He gave out his bullet-pierced tokens and explained that he had done the same for his dad when he was dying of cancer.
May not mean anything to you, Josey said. But it means something to me. I’m here to help you, if you want help. I don’t have all the answers. And it ain’t my job to make you feel better. I can’t make the pain go away.
For those with serious injuries, surgery followed surgery. Robby Payne, the funeral director, was in the hospital for two weeks, unable to perform his duties for fellow firefighters who had perished. Jake Sulak, the gravedigger, buried seven of his fellow firefighters, digging and crying day and night for a week.
“I never knew the body could hold so many tears,” said Doreen Strickland, of the Abbott department.
There were at least 53 people with traumatic brain injuries or concussions. One young man — his face deformed by lacerations when the apartment complex disintegrated — hanged himself from a tree in his yard that October.
Three months after the blast destroyed her home, Cindy Nemecek Hobbs was living in a trailer up the interstate, trying to figure out her next step. She had worked through the chaos and arrived at a revelation. A friend told her that the Bible talks about “the sweet aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing,” and she thought about the fragrance she smelled before the blast.
Others in West were equally in awe, groping for an explanation.
Baptist pastor John Crowder saw the blast inspire people to ask big questions and seek big answers. Himself included.
Townspeople talked about “angel stories,” the near-misses and unexpected graces born of the blast, and they processed it as a biblical accident with divine undertones. “God is good,” they took to saying, “and West is blessed.” Every person Nancy Hykel interviewed spoke of miracles. “There was a healing ceremony six months later,” she said, “and there was a double rainbow in the sky.” On social media, people shared a photo of the fire, with white flames seeming to form a cross in the middle of the blaze.
Disbelief nourished faith. A mythology grew.
If the judge hadn’t kept Stevie Vanek a few minutes longer . . .
If Jeanette Holecek wasn’t behind that old steel Chevy . . .
If Misty Kaska hadn’t found a coupon for Panda Express . . .
If Bryan Anderson hadn’t called his wife and told her to leave the house, and if Cindy Hobbs’s daughter-in-law hadn’t done the same . . .
Separately, they seemed like coincidences. Together, they seemed like a design.
But there was another set of ifs.
If only West had considered the risks of its encroachment toward the plant over the years . . .
If only the state fire marshal had been required to inspect the plant, and if only the plant had been required to install a sprinkler system . . .
If the fire department had been trained to recognize the gravity of this kind of blaze . . .
The town was not exactly thinking about that. Cindy’s mind kept reaching back into the past, to her immigrant grandparents: the trials they’d endured to come to West, to stay here, to run a business, to make a life.
In 1997, she lost her teenage son in a car accident. On that drizzly night she looked out her front window and saw the yard filled with boys from the football team, standing in silent vigil. The town that her grandparents had built, against great odds, was made of more than just train tracks and farmland.
Time passed. Rubble was cleared. Homes were rebuilt. Roads were repaved. Insurance-related losses climbed north of $200 million. Hundreds of lawsuits were filed against West Fertilizer and the fertilizer manufacturers, CF Industries and El Dorado Chemical, alleging negligence as well as defects in the product that caused injuries and death. West Fertilizer was hit with $118,300 in fines for violating several rules about the handling of hazardous materials. Through an attorney, Adair, the plant owner, declined to comment for this article.
Meanwhile, 19 other sites in Texas each continued storing at least 10,000 pounds of fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate within a half-mile of a school, hospital or rest home. At least an additional 170 sites held some quantity of fertilizer, many in wood-frame buildings.
As physical wounds healed, emotional ones festered. There was no clear villain to absorb the town’s anger — even as they sued the Adairs’ business, they perceived the family as fellow victims — and so people lashed out at the committee handling private donations and recovery money from FEMA.
And then insult to injury: Autopsies showed that two of West’s fallen firefighters had alcohol in their systems, and the state fire marshal issued a report critical of the West department’s response.
The town recoiled. These men were heroes — and volunteers. They had run toward danger so others could flee.
Outside the bounds of an investigation, Josey Visnovske, the peer responder, tended to the fire department’s psyche with his unorthodox and sometimes exasperating ways. He persuaded some firefighters to visit the blast site so they could see it in a controlled state — so it wouldn’t grow into something that haunted them. He confronted the West police officer who first reported the fire, and who was fogged by remorse because it sent his friend, a firefighter, to the scene.
“When’s it going to dawn on you that you killed your buddy?” Josey asked the officer point-blank, betting that this harsh tactic would shake him out of his stupor.
Josey Visnovske, the ATF agent, keeps a keychain with debris and talismans from various fire scenes.
Josey kept coming back to West, and slowly people opened up. It took a year for Judy to even acknowledge to him that she was at the plant when it blew. It took longer for one firefighter, a particularly hard nut, to talk about where he’d worked at the time: the rest home.
All the while, the ATF continued to investigate the cause of the fire, building replicas of the storehouse and then using them to test burning scenarios.
Through this process, they ruled out the weather.
They ruled out a cigarette.
They ruled out faulty wiring.
And then, on May 11, 2016, more than three years after the explosion, investigators held a news conference in West.
“The fire has been ruled as incendiary,” an investigator said.
That meant someone set it.
Stevie Vanek had just finished frying 170 pounds of catfish at the Knights of Columbus.
Finally, West had been given a sign that might help explain the inexplicable — but it wanted little to do with it.
The ATF’s announcement managed only to rip the scab off the wound, trip up the lawsuits and inspire a tremor of suspicion — much of it directed at the ATF. West was not on board for a whodunit, especially if there appeared to be no leads. The town had already spent years processing the blast, and it had arrived at something other than anger or blame.
Stevie, for one, couldn’t say why the blast happened, but he knows why he survived. And that was enough for him to make sense of it.
A year after the blast, Stevie’s wife had a heart attack in Fort Worth that left her in a coma. Stevie called a former St. Mary’s pastor, who told him to recite seven Hail Marys. Stevie did, and two days later Ann woke up, he says. At a Knights of Columbus barbecue, West raised a heap of money for her medical bills. Two thousand plates of food were sold, in a town of just 2,800.
It is a town that is always throwing benefits — fish fries, silent auctions, chicken dinners — whenever there is a need. Three months after the blast, the 4-year-old son of a deceased firefighter got the idea for a hot-dog sale and raised $80,000 for a new playground. It’s there now, mere feet from the old plant site, and features a giant firefighter helmet and a toy ambulance for children to play in.
Maybe this was the reason Josey kept coming back to West, long after a peer responder should’ve closed the book. The people got under his skin. The firefighters trusted him. He was like them in certain ways — a hardheaded, softhearted country boy who shot hogs in the woods at night — but he had also learned, from working other cases, about how to pull people through their darkness. He was back for each blast anniversary, and the firefighters hosted barbecues for him. Judy became like a second mom to him, the fire chief like a father. In West he felt accepted and understood in a way that eluded him elsewhere.
“Okay, then we’re moving forward,” Josey replied.
“I never looked at it that way,” she said.
Josey filmed interviews with members of West’s fire department. He presented them at conferences on trauma, where he extolled their strength and talked about how people aren’t wired to process emotions at the speed of an iPhone. He talked about the need to wait. To listen. To go back. To remember as everyone else forgets.
He was always telling his two young sons that in life you gotta do your job, but you also gotta do your part. The latter was always trickier, scarier, less obvious, more thankless, and not necessarily part of your plan. It was the reason Josey was returning to West.
The chief’s wife, Fran, believed that, without Josey, George would not have recovered emotionally.
“God sent you to us,” she told him.
Thunder sends a chill down the spine. A slamming door starts a cold sweat. Some wounds are visible — a light scar roping down the neck, a hitched gait from a cobbled ankle — and some manifest in slight panics, memory lapses, recurring nightmares, lingering guilt.
“I can’t forget,” says Bryan Anderson, whose hearing will never be 100 percent. “I live it every day. And even more so through him.” His son Kaden, now 14, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder but has come a long way; he’s starting high school and is an offensive lineman on the football team.
He learned this after his son died in a car wreck in 2005.
And the city reached milestone after milestone. Handsome homes of blond rock now populate the north end of town, a former wasteland. In 2015, a palatial new rest home opened, with a marble stone that acknowledges both the blast and “the presence of God” that day. June marked the end of the first year at the new high school, with its soaring ceilings and beautiful gym adorned with another West motto: “RISE UP.” The fire department is holding strong at 30 members, with several recruits. The town broke ground this summer on a permanent memorial to the dead, on a spot 25 feet from where an old Chevy saved Jeanette Holecek.
Not all is resolved. West is still sifting the ashes.
Individual lawsuits have been settling, and suffering is being measured in dollars.
The investigation into the fire itself is still open, and the ATF won’t comment on it.
But the defendants maintain that the plant and the fire department were well-informed about the detonation potential of ammonium nitrate, and that it doesn’t explode if handled properly. They also argue that the ATF’s ruling of a criminal act opens a flurry of questions that make it “impossible” to identify the exact cause of the disaster.
While the Obama administration drafted new safety rules to prevent another West, President Trump’s EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, delayed their implementation to review comments from key players — state governments that argue that disclosing information about chemical facilities poses a security risk, and industry leaders, who cite the ambiguity left by the ATF ruling that the West fire was criminal.
What you see in the wreckage depends on how you sort through it.
That is the modern history of West: big farms swallowing small farms, Walmarts opening in Hillsboro and Bellmead, West’s Main Street getting quieter, young people going off to college and not always returning. Everybody used to know everybody, older folks say, but at some point the fabric of the town began to loosen.
Easter 2017 came and went, as did talk of death and resurrection.
The fourth anniversary came and went, as did talk of how to remember and how to move on.
In the second row, Judy gripped Josey’s knee and cried, the first time she’d done so at a memorial. That day she, the chief and another firefighter went to the blast site, now patched with switch grass and evening primrose. There was no debris, no crater 90 feet wide. Just an empty lot with a plain white cross by the road. Josey asked for a group photo and was startled by what he saw through his phone.
Standing at the epicenter of their pain.
A few weeks later, Josey spoke at a trauma conference in Baltimore. His presentation was on how to plot a “road map” for moving forward after a terrible event.
“I’d 10 times rather be on a fire scene, digging one out right now, than being here,” he told the audience as he vibrated with nerves and emotion. “But I’m just trying to do my part.” Afterward, he escaped to the lobby, cowboy boots on, wristwatch smelling like smoke from all the fires he’s responded to.
This is what he wants America to understand.
America needs towns like West, a president once said.
Perhaps this, too, is part of the plan.
When Josey explains it, he is in tears.
Audio and some April 17 recollections were courtesy of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. The interviewers who collected those oral histories were: Amber Adamson, Georgia Hutyra, Nancy Hykel, Jaclyn Lee Jeffrey, Stephen M. Sloan, and Cynthia A. Zahirniak.
Video editing by Nicki DeMarco; graphics by Danielle Kunitz; photo editing by Sonja Y. Foster; design by Michael Johnson.
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The fantastic story behind one street photographer’s vast image archive.
Latest release Peninsular, commissioned by Abu Dhabi Festival, cements the Lebanese pianist's place as arguably the most exciting jazz musician working in the GCC today.
How much does the Gulf’s traditional folk music have in common with one of America’s greatest art-forms – jazz?
Far more than any musicologist might realise, argues Tarek Yamani, the trailblazing UAE-based pianist, who exposes and explores the shared rhythmic strands linking these two distinct disciplines in an ambitious new, multi-faceted project.
Commissioned by the Abu Dhabi Festival, Yamani’s conceptual new album Peninsular will have its live premiere on Sunday at a concert titled Portraits in Khaleeji Rhythms and Jazz, bringing together a jazz trio with a five-piece Emirati percussion troupe. The result of more than a year’s formal research, the concert and album are accompanied by a book, co-authored by drummer/collaborator Rony Afif, titled The Percussion Ensemble of the Arabian Peninsular, which offers academic study, transcription and history of 36 regional rhythms.
These generations-old percussive patterns form the basis of the Lebanese pianist’s latest sonic expositions. Each of the album’s nine tracks is built around a different rhythm – Qatari arda (Indisar), khaliji rumba (Hala Land) and the UAE sittati or bannati (Qumairah).
Two tracks are based on Yemeni rhythms – the country which gave Yamani his name – and the Lebanese musician professes a deep connection with the region’s desert-worn Bedouin beats. The link with jazz, says Yamani, is Africa – the same swinging, triplet feel which fuelled early jazz and Cuban music was also exported to the Gulf over centuries of trade.

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