Over the years that the big white shed loomed in fields by the railroad tracks, this small town slowly crept up around it.
First came the high school, built a quarter of a mile away in the late 1990s. More recently, a small Wal-Mart opened a two-minute walk across the highway.
Last year, real estate developers came to this North Texas town with a plan to put low-income housing just 1,000 feet from the shed — a fertilizer depot that handles tons of potentially explosive ammonium nitrate.
What happened next in Whitewright shows how much things have changed — and how much they haven’t — since the same kind of fertilizer exploded three years ago in the town of West, killing 15 and destroying schools, apartments and a nursing home.
On the one hand, many of the ag-supply and feed stores that used to stock a lot of the fertilizer have stopped selling it, a Dallas Morning News investigation found. Others have beefed up safeguards, such as moving the chemical out of dilapidated buildings and into fire-resistant concrete structures. Fire officials now have the power to inspect sites, and fire departments are more likely to have had training to handle the hazardous material.
But many of the recommendations made by safety investigators have gone unheeded. None of the sites that responded to News inquiries said they had installed sprinklers systems. The state does not require them, but the U.S. Chemical Safety Board has said such a system could have stopped the West accident before it became a fatal explosion.