After blast, West fights to keep its residents
WEST (AP) -- John Crowder stood on the gray concrete slab where his house once was, pointing out one spot after another. There was the garage where an overflow of guests would eat their Christmas dinner. There was the dining room where he ate meals with his wife and college-bound daughter. There was the chair where he would have been sitting, had he been home the night of the fertilizer plant explosion that ruined his home and many others in West.
"All the memories come back to mind. You think about the good times you had there," said Crowder, who watched the house come down last week. "That was hard. But that's an important step. That's the only way to move forward."
The slabs popping up across town are one sign that the effort to rebuild West has just begun, almost two months after an explosion that killed 15, injured 200 and forever changed life here. Town officials and many lifelong residents desperately want to keep people from moving away, but they face many obstacles: rebuilding schools and water lines, helping residents who in some cases are short tens of thousands of dollars and reassuring residents that their once-tranquil streets will be safe again.
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But there's still no running drinkable water in the area closest to West Fertilizer Co., now a 93-foot-wide crater where investigators could not figure out what caused the blast. The school district hopes to put older students this fall in portable buildings on the lot where part of the middle school once stood. And it's unclear where many people, particularly residents of an assisted-living center partially caved in after the blast, will come back to live.
More at http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/after-blast-west-fights-to-keep-its-residents-210394681.html .
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