Thirty tons of explosive ammonium nitrate have gone missing from a rail car.

A sixty thousand-pound shipment of ammonium nitrate had gone missing at some point when it left by rail on April 12, 2023, from the Dyno Nobel plant near Cheyenne, Wyoming. The final arrival was at a rail siding stop in the Mojave Desert in California, where the car was found empty two weeks later. Dyno Nobel stated that the loss occurred at a thirty-mile stretch of a spur tail off the main track. Dyno did not report the load as missing until May 10, 2023, to the National Response Center or NRC. The information is also in the California Office of Emergency Services database.

The company is a global manufacturer of explosives. Their product is used in mining, quarry, and open pit coal mines by blasting the earth's crust apart for fossil fuels and minerals to fuel our exploitation of the climate system for a high consumption economy.

Accidents that occur on-site result in severe burns but would not explode. In mining operations, chemicals such as diesel fuel must be added and then blasting caps.

In 1995, Timothy McVeigh brought down the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 189 people and injured five hundred. The incredible power of the destruction was from 5000 pounds of ammonia nitrate fertilizer. 

The bomb McVeigh built contained 5,000 pounds of ammonia nitrate fertilizer which was mixed with 1,200 pounds of nitromethane, commonly used as a solvent, and 350 pounds of Tovex, a water-gel explosive made with ammonia nitrate and methylammonium nitrate.

Ted Goldberg of KQED reports from San Francisco:

Dyno Nobel says it believes the material — transported in pellet form in a covered hopper car similar to those used to ship coal — fell from the car on the way to a rail siding (a short track connecting with the main track) called Saltdale about 30 miles from the town of Mojave in eastern Kern County.

“The railcar was sealed when it left the Cheyenne facility, and the seals were still intact when it arrived in Saltdale. The initial assessment is that a leak through the bottom gate on the railcar may have developed in transit,” the company said through a spokesperson.

A Federal Railroad Administration representative, though, says the investigation points to one of the hopper car gates not being properly closed.

According to Dyno Nobel, the train made multiple stops in its two-week-long trek. The company had little control of the shipment once Union Pacific moved the material. However, the company said the load was intact when it was parked in the desert.

The rail car will be returned to Wyoming, where the company will inspect it. Besides Dyno Nobel, the missing shipment is being investigated by the Federal Railroad Administration, the carrier Union Pacific and the California Public Utilities Commission.

From what I can tell in a Google search, Dyno Nobel has a record of safety issues.

With white nationalists declaring war on the United States, let's hope this shipment is not in the hands of homegrown terrorists, as they have infiltrated the military, police, and many government agencies, local, state, and federal. Only a tiny amount of the material could destroy a temple or a gay bar if one had the skills to do so.

The Cowboy State Daily has a detailed report readers would find interesting while somewhat calming nerves about the product in the wrong hands. They report that Union Pacific insists people should not set their hair on fire. We have learned some hard lessons from the deadly disasters of railroad malfeasance. We need to verify anything they say.

The ammonia nitrate that was shipped from Dyno Nobel was in a pellet form, which adds air to the mixture. It’s transported in hopper cars, like the ones that roll out of the Wyoming coal mines.

Stan Blake, a former Wyoming state lawmaker and retired train conductor, told Cowboy State Daily it wouldn’t be hard to drain one of the hopper cars of its load of the pellets.

The cars have two or three sections, Blake said, and there’s a gate at the bottom of them.

“You can use up a big bar and open that gate and it'll pour out,” Blake said.

With a mobile conveyor belt, the chemical can be carried from the open gate into a truck.

Blake said sometimes cars would be registered as carrying loads, but they’d be empty — and vice versa.

“A lot of times they don’t get that right,” he said.

Gizmodo:

This is the latest in a spate of train mishaps that resulted in toxic chemical spills, fires, and mass damage to towns as trains in the Midwest have derailed several times in the last six months. In one case, a spill in East Palestine, Ohio caused widespread panic among residents who were quickly evacuated due to the extreme toxicity of the chemicals spilled.

A Union Pacific spokesperson told Cowboy State Daily News that the loss of the ammonium nitrate is not something to be overly concerned about. “Assuming the loss occurred during transport, the release of the fertilizer to the ground beneath railroad tracks should pose no risk to public health or the environment.”

I won't sleep easy until spillage is determined to be the culprit. If any of the pellets were stolen, you wouldn't need much material to cause destruction. White nationalists could not overthrow the United States government in a violent insurrection, and we all know that they went to the top, the president of the United States. These people think outside of the box. We need confirmation from authorities that this rail car's bottom gate somehow opened and leaked all the pellets before arrival in California.