Texas' anti-terror law on ammonium nitrate fails to keep citizens safe, Dallas Morning News finds

Dallas Morning News map; click it for larger version

In 2007, Texas passed a law to keep ammonium nitrate away from terrorists, but the law says nothing about its safe handling, which has some concerned about another explosion like the one in April in West, Texas, that killed 15 and injured 300. James Drew and Matt Jacob of The Dallas Morning News found that "More than half of all facilities licensed last year by Texas to carry ammonium nitrate lacked either secure fencing or locked storage areas for the potentially explosive chemical compound," they report. "But the state didn't consider them a security risk."

The investigation found that the anti-terror law "sets a lax standard for keeping Texans safe. According to the state agency charged with enforcing the 2007 law, it has acted only once to temporarily bar a facility from selling ammonium nitrate that had recurring problems," Drew and Jacob write. This report comes on the heels of one released by the newspaper in August that found that the government has no idea how many chemical accidents occur in the U.S.

Of the 115 Texas facilities registered to handle ammonium nitrate in fiscal 2013, 62 lacked secure fencing or locked storage areas, Drew and Jacob write. "The law says an ammonium nitrate storage facility must be 'fenced or otherwise enclosed and locked when unattended.' The state chemist says a facility fails inspection if it lacks both secure fencing and locked storage areas, and added that there were no such failures in fiscal 2013. Using that double criteria, the News found two facilities in the state’s records that should have failed inspection in the last fiscal year and 40 over the fiscal 2008-13 period. The agency said it did not tally the number of failed inspections until receiving inquiries from the News and other public record requests. Last week, the agency’s director said it had always kept such a tally."

Many of the sites are in rural areas, and some are close to schools, homes and other inhabited structures, Drew and Jacob report. So, what's the law in your state, and how is it being enforced?