When was the London attack?
7/7/05
Guys, guys.....it's too early to assume terrorism. Here in Houston, our local refineries casually redistribute large parts with depressing regularity. Some of these incidents can be quite spectacular -- about 18 months ago, a news helicopter responding to an explosion and fire (or vice versa) at a motor-oil repackaging facility was treated to the sight of rather bulky, large storage tanks the size of over-the-road tanker trailers rising like moon rockets to eye level -- and they were above 500'. They backed off pretty quickly and substituted telephoto lenses for "up close and personal".
I once woke up one morning in Lake Charles, Louisiana, 28 years ago or so, and jumped in a car to go register for college 75 miles away, and noticed that the western horizon was a solid mass of black smoke from the west to the northeast. The Cities Service refinery had caught fire (again) overnight (having blown up -- and blown up an oceangoing tanker, too -- only five or six years earlier) and was a mass of flames. It burned for days.
Osama was in college at the time, and as-yet unradicalized. Ayman Al-Zawahri was probably already a loudmouthed jerk and conspirator, but not yet an accomplished terrorist.
It was all accidental, and all to be expected, from time to time, in towns where people handle and store massive quantities of flammable liquids or fertilizers.
In the 1940's, almost the entire town of Texas City was blown away by two massive explosions caused by fires in a fertilizer-handling complex at a local wharf. The first big explosion wrecked the wharf and brought all the firemen and ambulances to the scene, and then the bulk freighter Grandcamp blew up and killed almost all of them and sent her anchors flying for hundreds of yards in one direction and her propeller in the other.
And that was when Osama was in nappies, if he was alive at all.