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.

George Will: Rick Perry: A Texan’s ‘exceptionalism’

On the while this is a very positive article by George Will but we would be remiss if we didn't point out a few things that are not quite right.  Rick was raised a Methodist and the family are members of a Methodist Church in Austin.  He attends a church at times that is closer to the rental house they are living in while the Governor's Mansion is renovated from the fire.   That church is one of the non-denominational mega churches that has sprung up around the Country.  There are a lot of people that have been put off over the years by the mainstream churches as they have trended farther left.  To say that Governor Perry is an evangelical is stretching it a wee bit.

Perry says that as governor, he regularly attends numerous churches to speak. As for why he ultimately chooses to go to one place and not another, he said he administers a simple test. 

"If I remember on Wednesday what the message was on Sunday, it was a good message," Perry said.

Would bet a lot of people who go to church could relate to that last statement.   There are times while listening to a sermon you wonder what a pastor is talking about as they ramble on and on.  We had a Lutheran Church in the town I grew up where the pastor said if it cannot be said in 20 minutes, it is not worth saying and had his wife time his sermons who would give him a heads up when he was approaching 20 minutes.  His messages were ones you did remember.

Would like someone to explain this paragraph to me because most of it makes little sense to people outside the beltway:

 Mitt Romney, the Republican front-runner, might be easier to elect than to nominate. The reverse might be true of Perry. Is he a wine that will not travel? To win the White House, a Republican must be competitive among independents, including women, in places like Montgomery County outside Philadelphia. Perry — his accent, his Westerner’s body language, those boots — is proof that, in spite of the culture’s homogenizing forces, regional differences remain remarkably durable. But so, too, do regional antipathies, some of which have intensified as voters have become more polarized, partly because of a Texas governor who became president.

Speaking for a lot of us in Middle America, Mitt Romney is not someone we want to see as President and after his gaffe in Florida don't think we are alone.  Saying that "I am unemployed" was not a joke and if I was unemployed I would be highly insulted to think a millionaire considers himself unemployed.  All he wants to do is run for President or he could go back to work any day he chooses and if he chose not to work, he has plenty of money not to worry.  It shows that Romney is totally out of touch with grassroots America.

Another thing about the paragraph above that bothers me is why would a Republican candidate worry about what women outside Philadelphia think of our candidate.  When was the last time we could count Pennsylvania as a reliable red state?  Ronald Reagan?  It is what Middle America including Ohio and the south think of Gov Perry and he gets a huge thumbs up from us.

Governor Perry was very well received in NYC by the Republicans but then that doesn't fit the narrative that a Texan cannot win the Presidency again.  Why not?   Would rather have the plain spoken Texan any day than someone who changes their views to get elected.

Rick Perry: A Texan’s ‘exceptionalism’By George F. Will, Published: June 24San Antonio 

In the 1850s, on the steps of the Waco courthouse, Wallace Jefferson’s great-great-great-grandfather was sold. Today, Jefferson is chief justice of Texas’s Supreme Court. The governor who nominated him also nominated the state’s first Latina justice. Rick Perry, 61, the longest-serving governor in Texas history and, in his 11th year, currently the nation’s senior governor, says these nominations are two of his proudest accomplishments. 

French cuffs and cowboy boots are, like sauerkraut ice cream, an eclectic combination, but Perry, who wears both, is a potentially potent candidate for the Republican presidential nomination because his political creed is uneclectic, matching that of the Republican nominating electorate. He was a “10th Amendment conservative” (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people”) before the Tea Party appeared. And before Barack Obama’s statism — especially Obamacare’s individual mandate — catalyzed concern for the American project of limited government. 

Social issues, especially abortion, are gateways to the Republican nominating electorate: In today’s climate of economic fear, a candidate’s positions on social issues will not be decisive with his electorate — but they can be disqualifying. Perry — an evangelical Christian, like most Republican participants in Iowa’s caucuses and the South Carolina primary — emphatically qualifies. 

Pausing in his enjoyment of a hamburger the size of a hubcap, Perry, the Eagle Scout son of Democratic tenant farmers, says that he entered politics as a Democrat: “I never met a Republican until I was in the Air Force.” Perry’s father had been a B-17 tail gunner flying out of England in 1944. Perry, stationed abroad flying C-130 transports, became a captain and a believer in American exceptionalism. 

He matriculated into the culture wars in the riotous year of 1968. As the University of Texas at Austin was becoming a bastion of liberalism, Perry headed to Texas A&M, which was transitioning from an all-male military school but not from conservatism. He became a Republican in 1989 — “I made both parties happy” — at a younger age than Ronald Reagan did, and he has never lost an election. 

(snip) 

Between 2001 and last June, Texas — a right-to-work state that taxes neither personal income nor capital gains — added more jobs than the other 49 states combined. And since the recovery began two Junes ago, Texas has created 37 percent of America’s net new jobs. 

Excerpt:  Read More at the Washington Post

Low-tax Texas beats big-government California

Governor Perry has done a great job running the State of Texas and is such a positive spokesman for Texas. Looking foward to seeing him for four more years as Governor and the Democrat White returning to Houston in November 2010.

Other Governors would do well to look at the Texas model and see what can be adapted to their State.

Having lived in both states, would give the nod to Texas hands down because there is not a lot of political correctness in the state like has permeated California over the years where hard work is replaced by lawsuits in many instances or handouts from the Government.

This November, Oklahoma plans to join Texas with a Republican Governor Mary Fallin after eight years wandering with Gov Henry who is not the most energetic person on the face of the earth.

We have some really good Governors now in Perry, Pawlenty (MN), Barbour (MS), Daniels (IN), Jindal (LA), McDonnell (VA), and Cristie (NJ) for starters who make a deep bench for Republicans. We need to add to their ranks in 2010 starting with Oklahoma. Pawlenty is not seeking reelection to explore running for President so MN will be in play. We would expect to see maybe Daniels and McDonnell also consider getting in the Presidential race which right now is wide open. We believe Rick Perry when he says his heart is in Texas not in DC.

Low-tax Texas beats big-government California
By: Michael Barone Senior Political AnalystMarch 7, 2010

(AP)

"Stop messing with Texas!" That was the message Gov. Rick Perry bellowed on election night as he celebrated his victory over Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Republican primary for governor. In his reference to Texas' anti-littering slogan, Perry was making a point applicable to national as well as Texas politics and addressed to Democratic politicians as well as Republicans.

His point was that the big-government policies of the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders are resented and fiercely opposed not just because of their dire fiscal effects but also as an intrusion on voters' independence and ability to make decisions for themselves.

No one would include Perry on a list of serious presidential candidates, including himself, even in the flush of victory. But in his 10 years as governor, the longest in the state's history, Texas has been teaching some lessons to which the rest of the nation should pay heed.

They are lessons that are particularly vivid when you contrast Texas, the nation's second most populous state, with the most populous, California. Both were once Mexican territory, secured for the United States in the 1840s. Both have grown prodigiously over the past half-century. Both have populations that today are about one-third Hispanic.

But they differ vividly in public policy and in their economic progress -- or lack of it -- over the last decade. California has gone in for big government in a big way. Democrats hold big margins in the legislature largely because affluent voters in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area favor their liberal positions on cultural issues.

Those Democratic majorities have obediently done the bidding of public employee unions to the point that state government faces huge budget deficits. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempt to reduce the power of the Democratic-union combine with referenda was defeated in 2005 when public employee unions poured $100 million -- all originally extracted from taxpayers -- into effective TV ads.

Californians have responded by leaving the state. From 2000 to 2009, the Census Bureau estimates, there has been a domestic outflow of 1,509,000 people from California -- almost as many as the number of immigrants coming in. Population growth has not been above the national average and, for the first time in history, it appears that California will gain no House seats or electoral votes from the reapportionment following the 2010 census.

Texas is a different story. Texas has low taxes -- and no state income taxes -- and a much smaller government. Its legislature meets for only 90 days every two years, compared with California's year-round legislature. Its fiscal condition is sound. Public employee unions are weak or nonexistent.

Excerpt: Read more at the: Washington Examiner

Rick Perry's big win in Texas!

First time I voted for Rick Perry was for Agriculture Commissioner in 1990 after we were transferred into the State of Texas -- been a supporter of Rick Perry's ever since. From the time he took office to fill out the term of Governor George W Bush until now, I think he has been one of if not the best Governor we have in the Country.

Anyone watching Governor Perry and how he handled the Galveston Hurricane will tell you he was putting up with no nonsense. If you decided to stay, you were on your own.

Some so-called conservatives love to criticize Rick and will take one or two sentences out of what he says and make a whole story which doesn't tell the actual truth. I can guarantee you that most states would love to have Rick Perry. One of the reasons I hated to leave Texas with the closure of Kelly AFB was because their State Government worked.

While Texas was flourishing, we were stuck in Oklahoma with a Democrat Governor who this last time was a big Obama supporter. Pretty strange in a state where only 34% of the voters voted for Obama. Shows how far out of touch the Governor is with the State. He is term limited this year. We are going to end the eight years of Democrat rule in the Governor's office with electing Congresswoman Mary Fallin, the former Republican Lt Governor, to be our next Governor in January 2011. Then next year Governor Perry will be betting Governor Fallin on the winner of the Red River Rivalry in Octber 2011!

Congratulations Governor Perry on your big win yesterday -- we will be rooting for you to send White back to Houston on November 2nd.

Rick Perry's big win in Texas
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
03/03/10 1:12 AM EST

The conventional wisdom had it that the Republican gubernatorial primary in Texas would be a battle between challenger Kay Bailey Hutchison’s sophisticated urban base versus incumbent Rick Perry’s yahooing rural base. The election results—incomplete as I write past midnight Eastern time—tell a different story. Perry has won the Republican nomination without a runoff, with (as I write) 51% of the votes to 30% for Hutchison and 18% for Debra Medina (the candidate who got scrubbed from serious contention when she told Glenn Beck that she wasn’t sure the U.S. government wasn’t behind the September 11 attacks). That’s with 6,341 of 8,236 precincts reporting. Perry's margin is likely to increase as the final numbers come in.

The Texas secretary of state’s exemplary website shows separately the early voting results and the total results for each county. As the returns were coming in, it was apparent to me as I looked at counties with all precincts reporting that there wasn’t much difference between the early voting percentages and the total percentages when all the precincts were counted. So to get a sense of where the candidates were getting their strongest support, I added up the early voting totals for the four major metro areas as most recently defined, the 12-county Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, the 10-county Houston metro area, the 8-county San Antonion metro area (in which Medina County reported no votes cast in the Republican primary) and the 5-county Austin metro area. Subtracting from that left the 219 counties in the rest of the state. I didn’t separate out the heavily Hispanic counties along the Rio Grande Valley, because they cast relatively few (in some cases zero) votes in the Republican primary. I’ll round off the numbers to the nearest thousand in the following table, showing the number of votes and percentages for Hutchison, Medina and Perry and the total number of votes cast.

Hutchison Medina Perry Total

TEXAS 183 31 97 16 313 53 593

DFW 46 30 21 20 74 49 151

Houston 32 27 14 12 72 61 118

San Ant. 17 34 7 14 26 51 52

Austin 11 27 8 19 22 54 41

Remainder 77 33 37 16 118 51 231

Conclusions: (1) Perry won this not in rural and small town Texas but in metro Houston. This bodes well for him in the general election, since it indicates strength in the home base of the well regarded Democratic nominee, former Houston Mayor Bill White, who was nominated by an overwhelming margin. (2) Medina, the candidate who wouldn’t disrespect the truthers, did best in the supposedly most sophisticated part of Texas, the Metroplex. Go figure. (3) Hutchison, supposedly the candidate of urban sophisticates, did best in metro San Antonio and rural Texas. She held Perry below the 50% level needed to avoid a runoff in approximately half of Texas’s 254 counties; unfortunately for her, those counties didn’t give her nearly a big enough margin to offset Perry’s advantage in metro Houston.

Excerpt: Read more at the Washington Examiner: Washington Examiner