A volunteer paramedic in the Texas town rocked by a massive fertilizer plant explosion in April will plead not guilty to charges that he possessed an explosive device, his lawyer said Saturday.

AP

This photo provided by the McLennan County Sheriff's office shows Bryce Reed in a booking photo on Friday, May 10, 2013.

Bryce Reed, 31, is due to appear in court on Wednesday. He was arrested after a friend told a local sheriff that Reed possessed explosives, authorities said.  Reed had gathered pieces for a pipe bomb, according to court documents, but had not assembled the parts into a working explosive.

Reed had “no involvement whatsoever in the explosion at the West, Texas, fertilizer plant,” the man’s attorney said in the statement. “Mr. Reed was one of the first responders and lost friends, family, and neighbors in that disaster. Mr. Reed is heartbroken for the friends he lost and remains resolute in his desire to assist in the rebuilding of his community.”

The massive fertilizer plant blast on April 17 killed 14 people and injured 200 more, damaging dozens of local businesses and flattening homes closest to the plant. One official said that no evidence of a bomb has been found in connection with the blast.

Authorities announced Friday they had launched a criminal investigation into the blast, but the U.S. attorney’s office said in a statement it would “not speculate whether the possession of the unregistered destructive device has any connection to the West fertilizer plant explosion.”

Reed took on a significant profile in the aftermath of the disaster in the small town, giving interviews and delivering the eulogy for victim Cyrus Reed. “I will avenge this. This will get right. I don’t care what it takes. I will get square,” Reed said in an interview at the time.

The man’s attorney denied allegations that Reed possessed a destructive device and said Reed looked forward to his day in court.

“We ask that Mr. Reed’s family, friends and community not rush to judgment,” the attorney said in the statement. “Mr. Reed has been through significant hardship in the wake of the disaster in West and he has been responded and served his community with honor and strength.”

NBC News' Pete Williams and Tracy Connor contributed to this report.

Related:

• Texas blast rescuer arrested, criminal probe opened
• Ammonium nitrate caused Texas blast, officials say
• Texas fertilizer plant

Lm Otero / AP

Investigators said ammonium nitrate caused the explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, on April 17. Fourteen people died and more than 200 more were injured in the blast.

Investigators have determined that ammonium nitrate was the cause of the explosion at a West, Texas, fertilizer plant last month that killed 14 people and injured some 200 more, a spokeswoman for the Texas state fire marshal's office said Tuesday.

"The investigators have been able to narrow down the origin to the fertilizer and seed building on site, and we also know that what caused the explosion was the ammonium nitrate," said Rachel Moreno, a spokeswoman for the Texas State Fire Marshal's Office. "What we don't know is exactly why."

The fire marshal's office has been leading the investigation of the April 17 blast, along with the federal Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agency (ATF).

Ammonium nitrate is a dry fertilizer mixed with other fertilizers such as phosphate and applied to crops to promote growth. It can be combustible under certain conditions, and was used as an ingredient in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that left 168 people dead.

Slideshow: Fertilizer plant explosion in Texas

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A huge blast rocked a small Texas town, killing 14 people and injuring some 200 more.

Launch slideshow

In a fiery speech Saturday before cheering supporters, the National Rifle Association's Wayne LaPierre took on advocates for new gun laws and said a national background check bill “got the defeat that it deserved."

“We will never surrender our guns, never,” LaPierre, the organization's executive vice president, said on the second day of the gun-rights group’s convention in Houston, Texas.

He argued that recent mass shootings, including the killing of 26 people at a Connecticut elementary school in December, have been used “to blame us, to shame us, to compromise our freedom for their agenda.”

The gun rights lobby’s convention was part victory celebration, part pep rally as the NRA’s leaders cheered the defeat of a background check bill and said they would oppose any new attempts to pass national legislation on guns.

“Our feet are planted firmly in the foundation of freedom, unswayed by the winds of political and media insanity,” LaPierre said. “To the political and media elites who scorn us, we say let them be damned.”

A bill supported by President Barack Obama that would have expanded background checks on gun purchases would have done nothing to stop recent mass shootings, LaPierre said. That bill was defeated in the Senate last month.

“The bill wouldn’t have prevented Newtown or Aurora,” LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president, said in his speech to several thousand attendees. “It won’t prevent the next tragedy. None of it has anything to do with keeping our children safer in any school anywhere.”

Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania, co-sponsored the background check bill. Toomey has said the bill failed to pass because members of the GOP did not want to hand the White House a policy victory.

LaPierre also referenced the Boston Marathon bombings and subsequent manhunt as an argument for putting guns in the hands of more Americans.

“How many Bostonians wished they had a gun two weeks ago?” LaPierre said. “Boston proves it. When brave law enforcement officers did their jobs in that city so courageously, good guys with guns stopped terrorists with guns.”

NRA officials confirmed to NBC News that LaPierre’s remarks were the first time the organization had brought up the Boston Marathon bombings in connection with their political fight against new restrictions on guns.

The annual convention was expected to draw about 70,000 people over three days. As many as 550 exhibitors were packed into the George R. Brown Convention Center, bringing with them racks and display cases filled with handguns, rifles, and other firearms.

LaPierre claimed that the NRA’s membership stood at 5 million and said the organization aimed to amass 10 million members.

A lifetime membership in the NRA costs $1,000, and the organization was able to claim that both its youngest and its oldest lifetime members were in attendance on Saturday.

Wayne Burd of Arkansas was born in 1917, and was recognized for the second year running as the rifle association’s oldest lifetime member. Among the freshest faces present was the group’s youngest lifetime member, Elaih Wagan, a 3-year-old from Austin, Texas. Wagan's grandfather purchased a lifetime membership as a gift for the little girl.

NBC News’ Kasie Hunt and Gabe Gutierrez and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Related: 

• NRA annual meeting convenes as gun-control debate rages
• Toomey: Background check plan failed because of Republican politics
• Republican politicians pay tribute to NRA clout at annual meeting

A blast of cold air being dragged southward by a dip in the jet stream dumped snow in the Rockies, Plains and parts of the Midwest on Wednesday in a snowfall that meteorologists said could be “historic” for this time of year.

Up to 18 inches of snow is forecast for the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming, where heavy snow started falling Tuesday. Several inches could also fall by the end of the week in a band from Texas to Wisconsin, according to the National Weather Service.

Some portions of the Plains and upper Midwest regions, including Wisconsin and sections of Minnesota, could see a flurry of wet snow on Wednesday night into Thursday, Weather.com reported. A light early May dusting may even be seen as far south as the Texas Panhandle and western Oklahoma.

Cheyenne, Wyo., had already received more than 6 inches of snow early Wednesday morning, Weather.com reported.

The National Weather Service reported winter storm warnings were in effect for portions of north-central Colorado, southern Wyoming and southern Minnesota.

AP

Snow clings to flowers in Denver on Wednesday. As much as a foot of snow is forecast for some areas of Colorado.

With the jet stream bowing to the south, cold air is being sucked deep into the country, bringing temperature changes that may seem downright cruel to many, according to meteorologists at Weather.com.

Amarillo, Texas, is the perfect example. On Tuesday it hit a high of 97 degrees.

“By tomorrow morning we have … Amarillo at 30 and probably snowing,” Weather Channel meteorologist Kevin Roth said. “So in Amarillo we’re projecting a 67-degree drop from Tuesday afternoon to Thursday morning – so summer to winter.”

Minneapolis, Kansas City and Des Moines, Iowa, have been basking in the 70s and 80s. They’ll be lucky to see 40 through the end of the week, weather.com said. And Chicago just had its first 80-degree day of the season. It should have another on Wednesday before highs drop to the 50s and low 60s through the weekend.

The heaviest snowfall will be along the Front Range of the Rockies, with an area from central Colorado to southeastern Wyoming under winter storm warnings that call for up to 20 inches of fresh snow through Wednesday night. Just to the east, cities in the foothills, including Denver, could see five to eight inches of accumulation during the period, and roads could become icy and snow-packed, the weather service said.

Further east, where the cold air meets the warm, severe thunderstorms are likely Wednesday in parts of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, according to weather.com, which adds that the threat diminishes Thursday, with “marginally severe” storms possible in parts of Texas and southern Louisiana.

Travel disruptions could come with the worst parts of the storm, with Interstates 25 and 80 between Wyoming and Colorado in line for possible snow and ice, Roth said. But as of Wednesday morning, FlightAware.com listed only 16 canceled flights in the region, all at Denver International Airport.

“That will probably go up during the day,” Roth said.

While the storm may set some snow records, May is often a fickle month. Heavy snow is fairly rare, but temperatures in different parts of North America can range radically, Roth said.

Montreal, Quebec, and Ottawa, Ontario, for example, will be 30 to 40 degrees warmer on Thursday than normally toasty Oklahoma City, he said.

Cheyenne, Wyo., which hit 70 degrees Tuesday afternoon, was on the verge Wednesday of breaking its May snowfall record of 14 inches, Roth said.

“Cheyenne had eight inches as of midnight their time, and it’s been snowing steadily since that,” he said. “We think they’re going to end up with a good 12 to 18. … Welcome to May, right?”

NBC News’ Matthew DeLuca contributed to this report.

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Full coverage from weather.com

This story was originally published on Wed May 1, 2013 6:00 AM EDT

Child Protective Services is trying to figure out why eight children in Dallas were left alone in a home and later dropped off at a fire station.

CPS investigators have located and are talking with the mother of the eight children, aged 3 to 12, who were reportedly left alone Sunday morning at a house in Oak Cliff.

Police said two women who described themselves as acquaintances from church had gone over to the family's house to check on the children and did not find their mother at the house.

Around 7 a.m., the women dropped the children off at the fire station at 745 West Illinois in Dallas.

Dallas Fire Rescue told NBC 5 that the children were at the station for about 40 minutes before police and Child Protective Services responded. Firefighters fed and entertained the children before they were taken into custody.

The children could not tell investigators how long they had been on their own. 

More news from NBCDFW.com

All eight siblings are now in foster care and in good health. The children will remain in foster care temporarily while the investigation continues, according to CPS spokesperson Marissa Gonzales.

Investigators would not comment on what, if any, explanation was provided by the mother for leaving the children. CPS did not reveal if the mother would face charges.

This story was originally published on Mon Apr 29, 2013 5:35 AM EDT

Eric Gay / AP

Honor guards stand in front of caskets prior to a memorial service for first responders who died in last week's fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, on Thursday, in Waco, Texas.

President Obama, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and firefighters from across the country were among those who paid tribute at a packed memorial service to the victims of a Texas fertilizer plant blast that killed 14 people on April 17, many of whom were first responders. 

The deadly plant explosion decimated part of the small Texas city of West, with a population of only about 2,800. More than 200 people were injured in the blast; 12 who died were volunteer firefighters.

"These are volunteers: Ordinary individuals blessed with extraordinary courage," Gov. Perry said at Thursday's service. "They knew full well that another explosion was a possibility."

Caskets draped in large American flags were lined up in the front of the memorial, which was being held at Baylor University in Waco, located about 20 miles from West. The memorial was comprised of speeches from officials, as well as videos of victims' families and friends, who shared memories of their loved ones.

Obama told the crowd that West was an exemplary place.

"We need people who so love their neighbors as themselves that they’re willing to lay down their lives down for them," he said. "America needs towns like West." 

In the videotaped eulogies, relatives shared how those who died were passionate about protecting the people of West.

"Words cannot express how much I'm going to miss my husband. He was my everything," said Kelly Pustejovsky, wife of Joey Pustejovsky, a member of the West volunteer fire department who was killed, in a video broadcast during the service.

Six of Pustejovsky's other relatives spoke in the video too, including his grandmother, who laughed through her tears about her grandson's love of fried chicken, and said she knew he was in heaven now.

Obama said, "I cannot match the power of the voices you just heard on that video, And no words adequately describe the courage that was displayed on that deadly night ...What I can do is offer the love and support and prayers of the nation."

He also noted that last week was filled with overwhelmingly horrific news events, between the Boston bombings and the deadly blast in Texas.

"While the eyes of the world may have been fixed far away, our hearts were also here," he said.

The service was hosted by the National Firefighters Foundation. Chief Ronald Siarnicki, executive director of the foundation, told mourners, "This disaster happened last week, but we know the ground is still shaking, and will be for a long time."

"It could not break this community," Siarnicki said. "Remember this: Come tomorrow or the next day or anywhere from here on out, you are not alone, because the fire service will be here for you."

Obama flew to the somber event after attending the dedication of the George W. Bush presidential library in Dallas on Thursday morning. 

Texas Sen. John Cornyn and first lady Michelle Obama also attended Thursday's memorial service.

The large crowd inside Baylor was dotted with people wearing T-shirts that read, "God bless West."

Before the memorial, 1,000 firefighters from across the U.S. held a half-mile-long procession in Waco to honor the fallen firefighters.

Investigators have located a 93-foot-wide and 10-foot-wide deep crater where the central Texas explosion happened, but still don't know what caused the blast.

A 15th person who was injured in the blast — a 96-year-old man — succumbed to his injuries the following day, according to NBCDFW.com. 

Meanwhile, on Monday, the first individual lawsuit was filed as a result of the explosion. A single mom who lived next door to the West Fertilizer plant is seeking up to a million dollars after she and her 14-year-old son "lost all their worldly possessions," the suit says.

Drinking water in West is still not potable more than a week after the chemical fertilizer blast. Residents have boiled their water since the explosion, which shook the ground so much, it registered as a 2.4-magnitude earthquake.

Related content:

• Texas single mother files lawsuit in plant explosion
• Officials still don't know what caused Texas fertilizer explosion

   

A single mom, who with her young son "lost all their worldly possessions" in the fertilizer plant explosion that devastated West, Texas, is among the first people to sue the plant's owner.

Andrea Jones Gutierrez filed a lawsuit against Adair Grain on Monday. She is seeking up to $1 million.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Search and rescue workers comb through what remains of a 50-unit apartment building the day after an explosion at the West Fertilizer Company destroyed the building April 18 in West, Texas.

A fire at the West Fertilizer plant last week caused an explosion that killed 14 people, injured 200 others and destroyed at least 75 homes, according to officials. Investigators are still trying to determine what caused the accident.

Gutierrez lived in the building next to the West Fertilizer plant with her 14-year-old son, who was at church at the time of the explosion.

If Gutierrez hadn't walked out of her apartment complex when she first heard explosions outside, she wouldn't be here today, according to her attorney.

“Everything she and her child owned was completely destroyed,” said Randy Roberts, the attorney who represents her in the lawsuit. “She has physical and emotional injuries, but I’m more concerned about her emotional injuries.”

Two other people who lived in the same apartment complex as Gutierrez died.

Rod Aydelotte / AP

Heavy machinery is use to lift some of the debris from the West fertilizer plant Monday. The plant explosion plant explosion killed 14 people and injured more than 160 others.

“It has been over a week and the company is yet to assume any responsibility, offer assistance or contact those who were affected by this explosion,” said Roberts. “I do expect people to file lawsuits and keep them accountable.”

The company "was negligent in the operation of its facility, creating an unreasonably dangerous condition, which led to the fire and explosion," said a lawsuit filed Friday by insurance companies on behalf of individuals, two churches and businesses including a Chevrolet car dealer and a bakery.

Daniel Keeney, a spokesman for Adair Grain Inc and for its owner, Donald Adair, declined on Tuesday to comment on the lawsuits. "Our focus is on the fact-finding and on assisting the investigating agencies in any way we can," Keeney said.

Reuters contributed to this report

Residents have returned to a Texas town cratered by a massive fertilizer plant explosion that ripped open an apartment complex, damaged a school, and collapsed a nursing home, killing 14 people and injuring 200 more.

It is still not clear what caused the initial fire that sparked the explosion on April 17 in West, Texas.

About 1,500 students from the tiny town near Waco, Texas will go back to school in makeshift classrooms or a neighboring district on Monday. For many, the damage at home will take longer to repair.

“Every time I close my eyes, all I can think about is the explosion,” West High School senior Edi Botello said. “People running around. People evacuating. There was one point I couldn’t even talk. I just stuttered.”

Slideshow: Fertilizer plant explosion in Texas

Rod Aydelotte / AP

The huge blast rocked a small Texas town causing an unknown number of deaths and destroying nearby homes.

Launch slideshow

Those who lived close to the West Fertilizer Company plant say they were lucky to escape with their lives – but putting them back together will take time.

“I don’t think they can fix it, we have ceilings down,” NBCDFW.com quoted David Polansky as saying, referring to his family’s home. “My mother died in 2002, and that feeling is almost the same, you’re just crushed to see all this.”

Officials have opened what is known as Zone 2, a four-block area close to the plant, on Sunday. The area closest to the plant remains closed. Residents in the least damaged homes were allowed back Saturday night, with a curfew in place.

“What can you say?” said resident Jimmy Polansky, who claims his house was targeted by looters.

Investigators said they have found no evidence of criminal activity in the blast that tore through West just before 8 p.m. local time on Wednesday.

That’s a small comfort to resident Dee Dablin. The walls of her home about a half mile from the plant remain standing, but the inside of is wrecked.

Slideshow: West, Texas: 'They are all neighbors'

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In this small Texas town, people pitch in to help out following the deadly blast at a local fertilizer plant.

Launch slideshow

“It’s unbelievable, just unbelievable,” Dablin said. “But I’m alive, that’s all. I’m alive.”

The roof of an apartment building that sat across a strip of railroad tracks from the fertilizer plant was collapsed, the structure’s windows blown out, and debris scattered for hundreds of yards.

“Several blocks we had projectiles or shrapnel that has been found of different sizes,” assistant state fire marshal Kelly Kistner said, according to NBCDFW.com. “Smaller pieces have been found blocks away.”

The displaced congregation of the First Baptist Church in West held prayer services in a field on Sunday as the town took in the full extent of the damage.

“None of this makes sense. It is frightening, it is surreal,” Pastor John Crowder said at the service, according to the Waco Tribune-Herald. “Do you feel like I do, that we’re walking through a science fiction movie?”

Related:

• West, Texas gathers to pray, remember
• Satellite photos show West, Texas, before and after explosion
• ’Chaotic’ scene at nursing home devastated by Texas fertilizer blast

This story was originally published on Mon Apr 22, 2013 7:59 AM EDT

Four fishermen were missing Saturday after their boat sank off the Texas Gulf Coast, said the Coast Guard, which was searching an area about the size of Delaware for the missing men. One other crewmember was rescued a day earlier when searchers found him floating in a life raft.

The Coast Guard continued its search overnight on Saturday and into Sunday but the rest of the crew remained missing.

Trouble started aboard the Nite Owl, a 50-foot commercial fishing boat, at around 3:30 a.m. on Friday, when the Coast Guard received a distress signal from the vessel, Petty Officer Richard Brahm said. About five hours after launching a search by air and by sea for the boat -- which started to sink about 115 miles from its home port, Galveston, Texas -- a Coast Guard search team spotted crew member John Reynolds waving his arms aboard his orange raft.

"They saw a life raft floating. They launched a helicopter, went up there, and there was one guy in the life raft," Brahm said. Reynolds was in good condition, but worried about his fellow fishermen, Brahm added.

"We dropped him off on our oil rig, and our helicopter kept searching," Brahm said. "They took him back to Houston and continued searching the rest of the night and this morning we started searching again."

Reynolds was later returned to Galveston, a coastal city about 50 miles from Houston.

The search, which has covered about 2,000 square miles -- "a little smaller than the state of Delaware," Brahm said -- involved jets and other aircraft as well as boats. The Coast Guard continued its search overnight on Saturday and into Sunday, but the rest of the crew remained missing.

"When it comes to canceling a search and rescue case, that's really up to our search and rescue coordinators," he said. "They base a lot of factors into calling off a search," including water temperature, wind speed, and the number of people missing. 

The four missing fishermen were not identified. It's not clear what caused the boat to sink early Friday.

"The guy that we rescued just said the boat started sinking. He wasn't sure what caused it. That will be part of the Coast Guard investigation," Brahm said.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this article misidentified the rescued fisherman.

This story was originally published on Sat Apr 20, 2013 2:07 PM EDT

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 pounds 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.

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."

Company officials did not return repeated calls seeking comment on its handling of chemicals and reporting practices. Late on Friday, plant owner Donald Adair released a general statement expressing sorrow over the incident but saying West Fertilizer would have little further comment while it cooperated with investigators to try to determine what happened.

"This tragedy will continue to hurt deeply for generations to come," Adair said in the statement.

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."

The West Fertilizer facility was subject to other reporting, permitting and safety programs, spread across at least seven state and federal agencies, a patchwork of regulation that critics say makes it difficult to ensure thorough oversight.

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 they 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.

Slideshow: Fertilizer plant explosion in Texas

Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images

A huge blast rocked a small Texas town causing an unknown number of deaths and destroying nearby homes.

Launch slideshow

A U-Haul truck packed with the substance 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.

Wednesday's blast heightens concerns that regulations governing ammonium nitrate and other chemicals - present in at least 6,000 depots and plants in farming states across the country - are insufficient. The facilities serve farmers in rural areas that typically lack stringent land zoning controls, many of the facilities sit near residential areas.

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.

A separate EPA program, known as Tier II, requires reporting of ammonium nitrate and other hazardous chemicals stored above certain quantities. Tier II reports are submitted to local fire departments and emergency planning and response groups to help them plan for and respond to chemical disasters. 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.

"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.

Related:

Texas fertilizer plant also stored explosive chemical used in Oklahoma City bomb

Investigators: Texas plant explosion death toll raised to 14

'Our hearts are broken': Texas town grieves in wake of plant blast

Mayor of Texas town rocked by blast: 'We're going to fight back'

Texas fertilizer plant also stored explosive chemical used in Oklahoma City bomb