Bush Administration Responsible for No Oversight of West, Texas, or Other Fertilizer/Chemical Storage Facilities by EPA

“Perry reworked the language and helped to get it added to the spending bill in a conference committee. Under the new amendment, the DHS would have nominal authority to regulate the chemical industry but also have its hands tied where required.”

What Phillip Perry, VP Cheney's son-in-law, did was to add language the chemical industry wanted to an appropriations bill rider that moved the task of regulating and oversight of chemical plants from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Another day, another group that has bought and paid for Republican members of Congress.  This time it is the chemical industry which is only being highlighted after the West, TX, fertilizer plant blew up last week while storing large amounts chemicals that should have set off red flags. EPA is no longer in charge of regulating these plants while the Texas Department of Health who had the authority seems pretty worthless as they took the owner's word with no inspections.

Seems chemical manufacturer's thought giving DHS authority for regulation and oversight with little money provided by Congress would allow them to operate as they chose without no regard to safety.  As we saw in West, Texas, the lack of oversight blew up in their face with a plant storing chemicals that were way over the limit allowed in unsafe storage units with no markings so fire department officials didn't know what was in the storage tanks.  Because of not knowing what was stored, the volunteer fire department used water instead of foam which is used to fight chemical fires.  The owner of the facility has already been sued.

This picture is from the site of the West, Texas fertilizer storage facility the night of the explosion where 10 of the 13 killed were volunteer fire fighters, one was a paramedic, and one was from Dallas search and rescue -- all first responders who died because of lack of oversight and inspections of this plant:

With Chris Hayes connecting the dots on MSNBC with this video, it shows what happened which eventually led to the West, Texas, fertilizer plant exploding.

Summary of the Chris Hayes video:

Let’s recap: The Bush administration’s own cabinet secretaries come up with a plan to regulate these chemical plants. It’s stymied by Phil Perry once. The Bush administration sides with the chemical industry when it’s brought before Congress. And then, basically in a backroom maneuver, Perry does the chemical industry’s bidding by moving the oversight of this from the EPA, which the chemical industry hates, to DHS, which the chemical industry thinks they can more easily manipulate. 

Now, fast-forward six years. The West Fertilizer company is storing more than 13-hundred times the amount of ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight by DHS. And it does appear now, that not only did DHS literally have no idea that the West Fertilizer company was storing ammonium nitrate. But according to Congressman Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, DHS did not even know the plant existed until it blew up.

Everyone in America should watch this video which connects the dots which all lead back to the Bush Administration, Phillip Perry, and the chemical industry:

Bush and the West explosion: The untold story of deregulating chemical plants
Collier Meyerson, @youngcollier11:26 PM on 04/25/2013

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Seems the Bush Administration was in the hip pocket of chemical manufactures starting with Vice President Cheney's son-in-law, Phillip Perry, who is responsible for non-regulation of chemical plants by the EPA with his various positions in the Administration. Will someone please tell me why family of the President or Vice President is allowed to even work in the Administration. Cheney's daughter, Liz, also went to work for the State Department during the Bush years. You want to look at the main problem of the Bush Administration - look no further then the former head of Halliburton, Dick Cheney. His son-in-law along with the chemical industry and their bought and paid for puppets in Congress helped contribute to the plant in West, Texas, blowing up.  

Then there is the K-factor involved when it comes to fertilizer and chemical plants:

Koch Fertilizer, LLC

Koch Fertilizer, LLC, which is one of the world’s largest makers of nitrogen fertilizers. Koch Fertilizer owns or has interests in fertilizer plants the United States, Canada, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, and Italy, among others. Koch Fertilizer was formed in 1988 when the Koch companies purchased the Gulf Central Pipeline and ammonia terminals connected to the pipeline. The next year, the Koch Nitrogen Company was formed in order to market ammonia. The next few years saw purchases of various ammonia facilities in Louisiana, Canada, and elsewhere, and ammonia sales agreements with firms in Australia, the U.K., and other countries. The year 2010 saw the founding of Koch Methanol, LLC, and Koch Agronomic Services, LLC. In October 2010, a plant in Venezuela was nationalized by the government. In 2011, the firm acquired the British fertilizer firm J&H Bunn Limited.

Do you think that the Koch Bros were a major player in getting Phillip Perry to insert language into a bill to move control of chemical plants from the EPA to DHS so they would have less oversight, regulation, and scrutiny?  I certainly do and would suggest they probably rallied the rest and still are too prevent any oversight and regulation to another one of their industries. IMO, the Koch Bros with their aim to destroy all oversight and regulation by the Federal Government contributed to the West, Texas, disaster along with their puppets in Congress.  Are the Koch Bros taking their quest for lack of oversight and regulation on what they own worldwide as they buy up chemical and fertilizer plants around the world?

Given that the Bush-backed bill moving oversight of big places storing fertilizer from EPA to DHS is law of the land, and Republicans in Congress aren’t going to change it, the administration has been considering recently granting the EPA the original authority that Christine Todd Whitman wanted. The chemical industry lobby hates this. So in February, 10 Republicans and one Democrat teamed-up with a bunch of chemical industry groups to fight this tooth and nail. Here’s a letter from the groups to members of Congress. It reads in part:

“We have concerns about EPA’s arbitrary application of the General Duty Clause as well as the potential for future expansion of the General Duty Clause to regulate the security of chemical facilities.”

President Obama who as a Senator in 2006 sponsored a bill to make chemical plants safer.  Sounds like it was a reasonable bill, but the Republicans in the Senate killed the bill on behalf of the chemical industry.  After all, the GOP office holders need their wealthy donors to keep filling up their campaign coffers.  If something blows up in their face due to their obstructionism on oversight and regulation of chemical plants, no worry as it is only collateral damage is the way they act today.

Following is an excerpt of what Chris Hayes, MSNBC, is saying in the video above about what happened during the Bush Administration to kill oversight of chemical plants by the EPA. No wonder Christie Todd Whitman who headed EPA along with Tom Ridge who was the first head of Homeland Security did not come back for 2nd terms. 

We pieced together this story. Here’s what happened: in the wake of 9/11, there was tremendous concern about the vulnerability of chemical plants, including plants that stored fertilizer. The EPA knew that these chemical plants posed a legitimate risk to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The vulnerability of chemical plants made headlines across the country.

Two Bush administration officials, Christine Todd Whitman, who was head of the Environmental Protection Agency at the time and Tom Ridge, who was head of Secretary of Homeland Security, came up with a plan to deal with the vulnerability. Whitman believed that the EPA was already empowered to expand her agency’s oversight of chemical plants under a section of the Clean Air Act and she and Ridge worked out a deal to do so. 

That’s until the son-in-law of former Vice President Dick Cheney walked into the room, a guy by the name Phillip Perry, who was at the time the general counsel of the White House Office of Management and Budget. And he made it clear that the Bush administration was not going to support granting regulatory authority over chemical security to the EPA. According to reports, Perry claimed that their proposal was tantamount to overreach, and that they would need Congress to specifically authorize it. 

So, Christine Todd Whitman and Tom Ridge figured that the obvious thing to do was to go up to the Hill, and ask Congress for the authority necessary. But as Whitman writes in her book, “It’s My Party Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America”:

“Although both Tom and I agreed such legislation was necessary, strong congressional opposition–led by some Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee–to giving EPA even the modest additional statutory authority made it difficult to secure administration support for a meaningful bill.”

Basically, the Bush administration from above, pulled support for that bill because the chemical industry doesn’t want to be regulated by the EPA. Fast forward a few years, to 2007, and Phil Perry–again, Dick Cheney’s son-in-law–is now over at the Department of Homeland Security as the department’s general counsel. And what he manages to do, in an uncontroversial bill, in an appropriations rider, is slip in industry-friendly language into the bill that moves the task of regulating chemical plants from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Department of Homeland Security. But DHS is given none of the tools it would need to actually do that. 

Excerpt:  Read More at MSNBC 

Bottom line is that we can add another industry, chemical and fertilizer manufacturers along with the storage facility owners to list of people/groups who have bought and paid for Republicans in Congress.  Thanks to the Citizens United ruling, it has gotten much worse to the stage the Republicans in Congress work for the NRA and other groups and could care less about the rest of us.

Since the Republicans in Congress for the most part don't care about us then it is time to show them the unemployment line in November 2014 and then cut unemployment benefits for members of Congress to $1 a day!

How did West, Texas, Fertilizer Plant Avoid Inspection with 270 tons of Ammonium Nitrate Stored in 2012?

Last year West, TX, fertilizer plant was storing 1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

When the news of the explosion at the fertilizer plant came across, I had a hard time fathoming such an explosion as I have seen grain elevators catch on fire and storage facilities go up, but this was like a massive bomb going off that seemed more intense then the Murrah Bombing in Oklahoma City.

A Ryder truck packed with the substance(ammonium nitrate) mixed with fuel oil exploded to raze the Oklahoma federal building in 1995. Another liquid gas fertilizer kept on the West Fertilizer site, anhydrous ammonia, is subject to DHS reporting and can explode under extreme heat.

How much ammonium nitrate was used in the OKC Bombing?

On September 30, 1994, Nichols bought forty 50-pound (23 kg) bags of ammonium nitrate from Mid-Kansas Coop in McPherson, Kansas, this would be enough to fertilize 4.25 acres of farmland at a rate of 160 pounds of nitrogen per acre; an amount commonly used for corn {2000 pounds of AN divided by (160 lb/acre divided by 0.34 lb N/lb AN) equals 4.25 acres}. Nichols bought an additional 50-pound (23 kg) bag on October 18, 1994.

Bob Daemmerich / AFP / Getty

Devastation  A truck bomb made with more than 5,000 lb. (about 2,300 kg) 

of explosive-grade ammonium nitrate fertilizer ripped off the north side of 

the Albert P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. 

The blast killed 168 people, including 19 children

At the most, McVeigh used 5,000lb of ammonium nitrate fertilizer while this West, Texas, plant stored 270 tons.  That defies belief.  Will someone please tell me how that amount of ammonium nitrate being stored that was reported to the TEXAS Department of Health did not trigger an inspection as they relied on the owner's words?

This is what happens when you fail to follow the rules and a fire ignites leading to this explosion which pretty much leveled half a town.  What does the State of Texas do?  Immediately asked President Obama to declare an emergency declaration to get help into the state.  This article is not about the people who have been impacted but the audacity of TX Republican elected officials like Governor Perry, Senators Cornyn and Cruz and others who immediately wanted aid but in Congress voted against aid for Hurricane Sandy for the east coast.  Then there is the Governor with the big mouth who has done nothing but trash this President.  I think this graphic I was sent of Governor Perry fits this post:

This huge explosion was felt for miles in different directions.  It pretty much leveled or damaged many parts of the small town of West, Texas.  The people of West deserve all the help we can give them.  After that, I went to see a bill sent to the the State of Texas on behalf of the US Taxpayers for Federal dollars spent on this disaster.  Taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for Texas not overseeing this plant and reporting to the Department of Homeland Security the huge amount of ammonium nitrate that was stored at the facility in 2012 in violation of regulations.  The buck stops at Governor Perry:

In Texas, the reports are collected by the Department of State Health Services. Over the last seven years, according to reports West Fertilizer filed, 2012 was the only time the company stored ammonium nitrate at the facility.   

It reported having 270 tons on site.

How could reporting 270 tons not send off every red flag in the Texas Department of State Health Services.  When you start questioning why they had this amount on ammonium nitrate on site stored in unmarked storage tanks with no emergency management plan filed with the local fire department, you realize the firemen did not know what they were dealing with and poured water on the fire which is a huge mistake:

I work at a Coast Guard approved petrochemical plant on the Houston Ship Channel and have been in the petrochemical biz for about 11 years. Here is what we noticed when we reviewed the footage of the guys fighting the fire before the explosion... 

First, it is hard to tell from the footage but we believe that the volunteer fire fighters are using just water from a nearby hydrant to fight this fire.

That is a MAJOR no-no, since the fertilizer plant is probably full of ammonia oxidizers and other chemicals that are inhalation hazards. Basic water could have actually CAUSED the explosion. 

They should have used foam or powder based extinguishing materials....NOT water from a hydrant. 

We were wondering if this small town fire department has had proper haz-mat training to know how to handle fires with oxidizers and inhalation hazard materials? I am pretty sure they know how to handle haz-mat, like spilled gas or diesel fuels but those are class 3 flammables and handled VERY differently in a fire situation.

This person was replying to the disinformation on the site and what CNN was saying.  CNN had an extremely poor record last week of getting ahead of facts in rushing to be first to report.  Then there is this from a hazardous chemical consulting firm in Ohio:

It reported having 270 tons on site.

"That's just a god awful amount of ammonium nitrate," said Bryan Haywood, the owner of a hazardous chemical consulting firm in Milford, Ohio. "If they were doing that, I would hope they would have gotten outside help." 

In response to a request from Reuters, Haywood, who has been a safety engineer for 17 years, reviewed West Fertilizer's Tier II sheets from the last six years. He said he found several items that should have triggered the attention of local emergency planning authorities—most notably the sudden appearance of a large amount of ammonium nitrate in 2012. 

"As a former HAZMAT coordinator, that would have been a red flag for me," said Haywood, referring to hazardous materials. 

Cannot get past the very idea that the owner of this plant stored this many chemicals in 2012 and had not done so before.  Who owned the chemicals and why in 2012 did he store so many chemicals?  Both of those questions need answers not rhetoric.

When fire broke out at West Fertilizer Co., the first responders from the West Volunteer Fire Department faced a tough choice.

They could fight the blaze to try to stop it from spreading, or retreat and evacuate people from nearby apartments and a nursing home. 

"That is your basic fight-or-flight decision when you get there," said Stephen Cook, chief training officer for the McLennan Community College Fire Academy in nearby Waco. "And you don't know how much time you've got" 

Upping the ante in the minutes before the Wednesday night explosion was what the plant contained - ammonium nitrate and anhydrous ammonia, both key ingredients in some fertilizers, which can be tricky when exposed to fire and the water used to fight it.

Without a plan in place to know what chemicals were stored, this rural fire department of volunteers chose to fight the fire and in some instances lost their lives when the chemicals blew up which led to this scene of horror:

The wreckage of a fertilizer plant burns after an explosion at the plant in the town
 of West, near Waco, Texas early April 18, 2013. The deadly explosion ripped
through the fertilizer plant late on Wednesday, injuring more than 160 people,
leveling dozens of homes and damaging other buildings including a school and
nursing home, authorities said. (Reuters/Mike Stone)

Texas's Fertilizer Plant ExplosionApr 22, 2013 |

Last week, while media attention was focused on Boston, a massive explosion took place at the West Fertilizer Company, in the small town of West, Texas. The blast damaged 150 buildings, including three of West's four schools, killed 14 people and injured more than 160 others. It was so powerful that it set off seismographs, registering as a 2.1-magnitude tremor. The cause remains unknown, and investigators are still sifting through the rubble. Today, about 1,500 West students returned to school, set up in makeshift classrooms or in nearby districts. [40 photos]

The basic questions remain on why was this West Fertilizer Plant storing these amounts of chemicals and why didn't the State of Texas act?  We all know the the Republicans in Congress have been holding up and cutting funds for agencies like the EPA, Homeland Security, and others who are the regulatory arms of the Government.  You would think this would wake them up but not going to happen as they will most likely find Democrats to blame as most Republican elected officials refuse to take the blame for anything in today's world.

Texas Fertilizer Plant Didn't Heed Disclosure Rules Before Blast
 Published: Monday, 22 Apr 2013 | 9:24 AM ET

Getty Image   Smoke still rises from the rubble 
of a house next to the fertilizer plant that exploded 
yesterday afternoon on April 18, 2013 in West, Texas.

The fertilizer plant that exploded on Wednesday, obliterating part of a small Texas town and killing at least 14 people, had last year been storing 1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Yet a person familiar with DHS operations said the company that owns the plant, West Fertilizer, did not tell the agency about the potentially explosive fertilizer as it is required to do, leaving one of the principal regulators of ammonium nitrate—which can also be used in bomb-making—unaware of any danger there. 

Fertilizer plants and depots must report to the DHS when they hold 400 lb (180 kg) or more of the substance. Filings this year with the Texas Department of State Health Services, which weren't shared with DHS, show the plant had 270 tons of it on hand last year. 

(Read More: Back Home, Residents Return to Texas After Blast) 

A U.S. congressman and several safety experts called into question on Friday whether incomplete disclosure or regulatory gridlock may have contributed to the disaster. 

"It seems this manufacturer was willfully off the grid," Rep. Bennie Thompson, (D-MS), ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement. "This facility was known to have chemicals well above the threshold amount to be regulated under the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Act (CFATS), yet we understand that DHS did not even know the plant existed until it blew up."   

(clip) 

Failure to report significant volumes of hazardous chemicals at a site can lead the DHS to fine or shut down fertilizer operations, a person familiar with the agency's monitoring regime said. Though the DHS has the authority to carry out spot inspections at facilities, it has a small budget for that and only a "small number" of field auditors, the person said.

Firms are responsible for self reporting the volumes of ammonium nitrate and other volatile chemicals they hold to the DHS, which then helps measure plant risks and devise security and safety plans based on them. 

Since the agency never received any so-called top-screen report from West Fertilizer, the facility was not regulated or monitored by the DHS under its CFAT standards, largely designed to prevent sabotage of sites and to keep chemicals from falling into criminal hands. 

The DHS focuses "specifically on enhancing security to reduce the risk of terrorism at certain high-risk chemical facilities," said agency spokesman Peter Boogaard. "The West Fertilizer Co. facility in West, Texas is not currently regulated under the CFATS program." 

(snip) 

An expert in chemical safety standards said the two major federal government programs that are supposed to ensure chemical safety in industry—led by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)—do not regulate the handling or storage of ammonium nitrate. That task falls largely to the DHS and the local and state agencies that oversee emergency planning and response. 

More than 4,000 sites nationwide are subject to the DHS program. 

"This shows that the enforcement routine has to be more robust, on local, state and federal levels," said the expert, Sam Mannan, director of process safety center at Texas A&M University. "If information is not shared with agencies, which appears to have happened here, then the regulations won't work." 

Hodgepodge of Regulation 

Chemical safety experts and local officials suspect this week's blast was caused when ammonium nitrate was set ablaze. Authorities suspect the disaster was an industrial accident, but haven't ruled out other possibilities. 

The fertilizer is considered safe when stored properly, but can explode at high temperatures and when it reacts with other substances. 

"I strongly believe that if the proper safeguards were in place, as are at thousands of (DHS) CFATS-regulated plants across the country, the loss of life and destruction could have been far less extensive," said Rep. Thompson. 

A blaze was reported shortly before a massive explosion leveled dozens of homes and blew out an apartment building. 

(snip)

Apart from the DHS, the West Fertilizer site was subject to a hodgepodge of regulation by the EPA, OSHA, the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Texas Department of State Health Services, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Office of the Texas State Chemist. 

But the material is exempt from some mainstays of U.S. chemicals safety programs. For instance, the EPA's Risk Management Program (RMP) requires companies to submit plans describing their handling and storage of certain hazardous chemicals. Ammonium nitrate is not among the chemicals that must be reported.

In its RMP filings, West Fertilizer reported on its storage of anhydrous ammonia and said that it did not expect a fire or explosion to affect the facility, even in a worst-case scenario. And it had not installed safeguards such as blast walls around the plant.

Excerpt:  Read More at CNBC

Aerial view of the damage left behind by a massive explosion at the West Fertilizer Company, on April 18, 2013. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Look at that picture above and then realize that this plant has not had a thorough inspection in 35 years according to this excerpted article form Huffington Post:

West Fertilizer Plant's Hazards Eluded Regulators For Nearly 30 Years
Posted: 04/22/2013 7:00 pm EDT  |  Updated: 04/23/2013 12:10 pm EDT

(clip)

Through interviews with former regulators and community leaders, as well as a review of hundreds of pages of documents going back to 1976, a sense emerges that no institution sounded the alarm here, even as fertilizer piled up inside the plant, creating a potentially deadly tinderbox in close proximity to the town. No one effectively prepared for the emergency that eventually materialized, leaving this community uniquely vulnerable to the tragedy that unfolded last week when the plant caught fire and exploded, killing 14 people and ripping apart an apartment building, a school and dozens of homes. 

In June 2011 -- less than two years before the explosion -- the private company that owns the plant, the West Fertilizer Co., filed an emergency response plan with the Environmental Protection Agency stating that there was "no" risk of fire or explosion at the facility. The worst scenario that plant officials acknowledged was the possible release of a small amount of ammonia gas into the atmosphere. 

Fertilizer long has been recognized as a dangerous combustible material. One variety, ammonium nitrate -- a pellet-shaped product typically shipped in large bags -- caused the deadliest industrial accident in American history, the explosion of a ship at the port of Texas City in 1947, which took the lives of more than 500 people. 

(clip) 

Documents reviewed by The Huffington Post indicate that the last time regulators performed a full safety inspection of the facility was nearly 28 years ago. The entity with primary authority to ensure workplace safety, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, last visited in 1985, according to OSHA records. 

Since then, regulators from other agencies have been inside the plant, but they looked only at certain aspects of plant operations, such as whether the facility was abiding by labeling rules when packaging its fertilizer for sale. 

The most recent partial safety inspection at West Fertilizer was in 2011. That inspection, by the U.S Department of Transportation Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Commission, led to a $5,200 fine for a variety of infractions, including failing to draft a safety plan for the transport of the large canisters of pressurized anhydrous ammonia stored on site.

In 2006, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the primary enforcer of environmental law in the state, noted that two schools were situated within 3,000 feet of the fertilizer plant. But the agency determined that "the impact potential" of an accident on the neighboring community "was low." 

When assessing risks at the plant, the commission and the EPA focused solely on the potential hazards of the ammonium canisters, such as whether they were stored correctly or were leaking. The agencies did not inspect to see if other chemicals on hand might ignite and explode.
"There is really no safety assessment of these facilities when there should be," said Neil Carman, who for more than a decade inspected facilities like West Fertilizer while working for the Texas commission, before joining the Sierra Club, the national environmental advocacy organization. 

Neither Donald Adair, the plant's owner, nor Ted Uptmore, its manager, could be reached for comment. Adair released a statement on Friday, writing: "My heart is broken with grief for the tragic losses to so many families in our community." He added that "the tragedy will continue to hurt deeply for generations to come." 

Excerpt:  Read More at The Huffington Post

How many other plants like this are storing chemicals with no real plans or have had few inspections due to the fact that the agencies involved have had their budgets cut to the bone and now face furloughs of their inspectors.

When is the Republican obstruction with underfunding some of these agencies who are here to protect our health and safety going to stop.  Have GOP elected officials  have been so bought by their wealthy donors like the Koch Bros who want no inspections, they don't seem to know right from wrong today? How many more deaths to we have to have caused by their stubbornness in passing funding bills for these agencies.  Yet mention defense, and their wallets come out to fully fund the DoD and their defense industry donors.  There is so much waste at DoD that anyone who has been involved with defense knows the real facts.  Facts don't matter to Republican elected officials today - it is making sure they vote "NO" like their big donors/lobbyists want on key issues like background checks and gun trafficking, regulations to protect the healthy and safety of people, regulations on oil and gas, etc.

GOP has done a good job over the years make the EPA the bogeyman - I swallowed some of that koolaid but no more.  I want a fully functioning EPA, Homeland Security, OSHA, FDA and any other agency that is responsible for insuring that companies are required to follow strict regulations.  If you run a company according to the rules, you wouldn't have to worry.  That tells a lot of us that the Koch Bros cut corners and don't care what happens to people as long as their vast empire keeps growing with an aim to control government for their own selfish interests.

This is just another reason in a long list to vote out Republicans in 2014 and elect candidates to restore some sanity to the halls of Congress so the Country can move forward from the obstructionists!

UPDATE: 
 
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama will attend Thursday’s memorial service for victims of the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas.

“After the formal opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, the President and First Lady will travel to Baylor University in Waco, Texas to attend the memorial service for those lost and injured in the deadly explosion at the fertilizer plant,” a White House aide said Monday afternoon.
White House press secretary Jay Carney announced the visit moments later at his daily briefing.

Obama will attend the Bush Center event with four living ex-presidents.