Emergency workers evacuate people from a damaged nursing home after the explosion at the fertilizer plant in West, Tex., on April 17, 2013. (Rod Aydelotte/AP)
Sometime before 7:30 p.m. on April 17, 2013, in the small town of West, Tex., a fire broke out at the West Fertilizer Company plant.
Thirty volunteers made up the town’s fire department. They heard the beep on their pagers, said goodbye to their families and headed to the source of the menacing black smoke.
Some of them, 12 of them, wouldn’t come back.
Twenty minutes after the fire started, the plant exploded — so powerfully that it registered as a 2.1-magnitude earthquake on the Richter scale. A total of 15 people died in the blast, including the 12 volunteer first responders. Two hundred sixty people were injured, and…
