Rick Perry wants apology from cartoonist Ohman

[Sara S]

Sacramento Bee (https://www.sacbee.com/2013/04/25/5372555/rick-perry-explosion-cartoon-published.html#storylink=omni_popular) | Fox News (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/04/27/perry-blasts-california-newspaper-for-cartoon-depicting-texas-plant-explosion/)

Sacramento Bee editorial cartoonist Jack Ohman has refused to apologize for an editorial cartoon berating loose business regulations in Texas (https://www.sacbee.com/2013/04/25/5372555_a5369617/rick-perry-explosion-cartoon-published.html) that potentially led to the April 17 explosion of a fertilizer plant in the town of West, killing at least 14 people and injuring as many as 200 others.
https://www.poynter.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/perrycartoon.jpeg (https://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/211923/sacbees-jack-ohman-wont-apologize-for-texas-explosion-cartoon/attachment/perrycartoon/)
Ohman wrote on his blog that he had received many complaints calling it (and him) “insensitive and tasteless” (https://www.sacbee.com/2013/04/25/5372555/rick-perry-explosion-cartoon-published.html#storylink=omni_popular) and pointed out he had drawn much more graphic images in the past to make his points.

I knew it was close to the edge, but I went with it, and I don’t go with things I can’t defend. I’m defending this one because I think that when you have a politician traveling across the country selling a state with low regulatory capacity, that politician also has to be accountable for what happens when that lack of regulation proves to be fatal.

Ohman told Poynter via email Monday “the responses have been running more positive than negative starting Saturday.” He said the sheer volume of attention the cartoon has gotten online has been staggering: “The social media exponential multiplier effect turned it into something I’ve never experienced, nor do I think any other U.S. political cartoonist had experienced,” he said.
The Bee on Friday posted a letter to the editor from Perry demanding Ohman and the Bee apologize for the cartoon (https://www.sacbee.com/2013/04/26/5375185/gov-perry-weighs-in-on-texas-explosion.html#storylink=cpy).
“It was with extreme disgust and disappointment I viewed your recent cartoon. While I will always welcome healthy policy debate, I won’t stand for someone mocking the tragic deaths of my fellow Texans and our fellow Americans,” Perry wrote. “Additionally, publishing this on the very day our state and nation paused to honor and mourn those who died only compounds the pain and suffering of the many Texans who lost family and friends in this disaster. The Bee owes the community of West, Texas an immediate apology for your detestable attempt at satire.”
Fox News also quoted Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst demanding Ohman be fired for the cartoon (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/04/27/perry-blasts-california-newspaper-for-cartoon-depicting-texas-plant-explosion/). “I think it’s reprehensible for a member of the media to sit in safety and mock such a profound tragedy regardless of any ‘point’ he is trying to make,” Dewhurst said.
Ohman also told Poynter “the Bee editors and the publisher have been completely supportive.” Bee editorial page editor Stuart Leavenworth defended the cartoon in a response to the letter:

Jack Ohman’s cartoon of April 25 made a strong statement about Gov. Rick Perry’s disregard for worker safety, and his attempts to market Texas as a place where industries can thrive with few regulations. It is unfortunate that Gov. Perry, and some on the blogosphere, have attempted to interpret the cartoon as being disrespectful of the victims of this tragedy. As Ohman has made clear on his blog, he has complete empathy for the victims and people living by the plant. What he finds offensive is a governor who would gamble with the lives of families by not pushing for the strongest safety regulations. Perry’s letter is an attempt to distract people from that message.

[dzerach]

I wonder if the self-righteous Perry also finds it inappropriate to publicly vow a thorough investigation on how such an explosion could happen, and to reassure necessary steps will be taken towards prevention. Seems like one of the ways to honor the victims. But the fact is that people in that area are so grateful for the jobs that it's a sin to criticize. Even now. I am so sick of Texas, that culture's deadly impact, over the decades, on this entire nation. The news below shows how this isn't just all about Texas. I do wish that what goes on in the state would stay in the state, but it frequently, historically, has not!

I drastically reorganized the paragraphs from this Reuters feed but didn't change any of the words.

https://www.wacotrib.com/news/greater_waco/west/west-plant-had-history-of-thefts/article_d7af4df7-60e1-5240-9cbe-23e2a1fc2e1e.html


The West fertilizer plant was a repeat target of theft by intruders who tampered with tanks and caused the release of toxic chemicals, police records reviewed by Reuters show. During the past 12 years, Police responded to at least 11 reports of burglaries and five separate ammonia leaks at West Fertilizer Co. according to 9-1-1 dispatch logs and criminal offense reports Reuters obtained from the McLennan County Sheriff’s office in Waco through an open-records request. Some of the leaks, including one reported in October 2012, were linked to theft or interference with tank valves.

Police records show West Fertilizer began complaining of repeated thefts from the facility in June 2001, when burglars stole 150 pounds of anhydrous ammonia from storage tanks three nights in a row. By 2002 a plant manager told police that thieves were siphoning four to five gallons of the liquefied fertilizer every three days. The liquid gas can be used to cook methamphetamine, the addictive and illicit stimulant.

According to several government and fertilizer industry reports issued during the past 13 years, across the United States, the thriving meth trade has turned storage facilities like West Fertilizer Co. and even unattended tanks in farm fields into frequent targets of theft. A 2005 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study identified hundreds of cases in 16 states where anhydrous ammonia was stolen for use in meth production. But, cases of ammonia theft have become less frequent since 2006, when new laws restricted the sale of pseudoephedrine, which is found in some common cold drug remedies, according to The Fertilizer Institute, an industry association.

Investigators have offered no evidence that security breaches contributed to the deadly incident. There also is no indication that the explosion had anything to do with the theft of materials for drug making. Anhydrous ammonia has been ruled out as a cause; the four storage tanks remained intact after the blast, said Rachel Moreno, a spokeswoman for the Texas Fire Marshal’s Office.

Apart from anhydrous ammonia, the company stored tons of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that can be used in bomb-making. No thefts of that substance were reported to police. Chemical safety experts said the recurrent security breaches at West Fertilizer are troubling because they suggest vulnerability to theft, leaks, fires or explosions. A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, one of several state and federal agencies that monitor security at chemical plants, declined to answer questions about the breaches of security at West Fertilizer Co. State investigators also declined to comment.

Thefts of anhydrous ammonia are common in McLennan County, where burglars siphon fertilizer from trailer tanks into five-gallon propane containers, said McLennan County Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Matt Cawthon, who took up the position in January. After reviewing crime reports from the past 12 years and speaking to deputies who responded to some of the break-ins, Cawthon said security was clearly lax at the plant. The perimeter was not fenced. The facility had no burglar alarms, no security guards, he said. Randy Plemons, who was chief deputy sheriff during the years when the thefts occurred, declined to discuss specifics of his agency’s response to the repeated break-ins. “Whenever we were notified of the burglaries and thefts we responded to those,” he said. “I can’t speak to every offense.”

“It was a hometown-like situation,” McLennan County Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Matt Cawthon said. Everybody trusts everybody.”

The current owners of West Fertilizer are Donald Adair, 83, and Wanda Adair, 78, who bought it in 2004.
Company owners downplayed security risks in documents submitted to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality in 2006, saying thefts had dropped to zero during the preceding 20 months as meth makers now had found a substitute for anhydrous ammonia available at garden nurseries or major retailers.

“Regardless of what triggered this specific event, the fact that there were lots of burglaries and that they were after ammonia clearly shows this plant was vulnerable to unwanted intruders or even a terrorist attack,” said Sam Mannan, a chemical process safety expert at Texas A&M University, who has advised Dow Chemical and others on chemical security.

In a 2006 permit application with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the company reported it would protect ammonia tanks against theft or tampering and conduct daily equipment inspections. A TCEQ spokesman would not comment about security measures. He said the agency’s responsibility is to regulate emissions from the plant, not to oversee security. Yet burglars and trespassers continued to target the facility. Following a series of break-ins in late 2008 and early 2009, including one where a trespasser visited pornographic websites on a secretary’s computer, police told plant manager Ted Uptmore — who has worked at the company for decades — to install a surveillance system. Later documents show the company complied. Uptmore did not respond to phone calls seeking comment for this story.

The last record of tampering was in October 2012, when a 9-1-1 caller reported an odor “so strong it can burn your eyes.” The firm dispatched Cody Dragoo, an employee often sent after hours to shut leaking valves and look into break-ins. That night, he shut off the valve but reported it had been tampered with.

Ammonium nitrate was among the ingredients in the bomb used by Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, killing 168 people. After that bombing, Congress passed a law requiring facilities that store large amounts of the chemical to report to the DHS and work with the agency to ensure proper security measures are in place to keep it out of criminal hands and protect against such attacks. West Fertilizer did not report to DHS, despite storing hundreds of times more ammonium nitrate than the amount that would require it do so. Companies are required to report if they store at least 2,000 pounds of fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate, or 400 pounds of the substance when it’s combined with combustible material. Documents from the Texas Department of State Health Services show that the West plant was storing 54,000 pounds of anhydrous ammonia and 540,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate in 2012.






Sacramento Bee (https://www.sacbee.com/2013/04/25/5372555/rick-perry-explosion-cartoon-published.html#storylink=omni_popular) | Fox News (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/04/27/perry-blasts-california-newspaper-for-cartoon-depicting-texas-plant-explosion/)

Sacramento Bee editorial cartoonist Jack Ohman has refused to apologize for an editorial cartoon berating loose business regulations in Texas (https://www.sacbee.com/2013/04/25/5372555_a5369617/rick-perry-explosion-cartoon-published.html) that potentially led to the April 17 explosion of a fertilizer plant in the town of West, killing at least 14 people and injuring as many as 200 others.
https://www.poynter.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/perrycartoon.jpeg (https://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/211923/sacbees-jack-ohman-wont-apologize-for-texas-explosion-cartoon/attachment/perrycartoon/)
Ohman wrote on his blog that he had received many complaints calling it (and him) “insensitive and tasteless” (https://www.sacbee.com/2013/04/25/5372555/rick-perry-explosion-cartoon-published.html#storylink=omni_popular) and pointed out he had drawn much more graphic images in the past to make his points.
I knew it was close to the edge, but I went with it, and I don’t go with things I can’t defend. I’m defending this one because I think that when you have a politician traveling across the country selling a state with low regulatory capacity, that politician also has to be accountable for what happens when that lack of regulation proves to be fatal.

Ohman told Poynter via email Monday “the responses have been running more positive than negative starting Saturday.” He said the sheer volume of attention the cartoon has gotten online has been staggering: “The social media exponential multiplier effect turned it into something I’ve never experienced, nor do I think any other U.S. political cartoonist had experienced,” he said.
The Bee on Friday posted a letter to the editor from Perry demanding Ohman and the Bee apologize for the cartoon (https://www.sacbee.com/2013/04/26/5375185/gov-perry-weighs-in-on-texas-explosion.html#storylink=cpy).
“It was with extreme disgust and disappointment I viewed your recent cartoon. While I will always welcome healthy policy debate, I won’t stand for someone mocking the tragic deaths of my fellow Texans and our fellow Americans,” Perry wrote. “Additionally, publishing this on the very day our state and nation paused to honor and mourn those who died only compounds the pain and suffering of the many Texans who lost family and friends in this disaster. The Bee owes the community of West, Texas an immediate apology for your detestable attempt at satire.”
Fox News also quoted Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst demanding Ohman be fired for the cartoon (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/04/27/perry-blasts-california-newspaper-for-cartoon-depicting-texas-plant-explosion/). “I think it’s reprehensible for a member of the media to sit in safety and mock such a profound tragedy regardless of any ‘point’ he is trying to make,” Dewhurst said.
Ohman also told Poynter “the Bee editors and the publisher have been completely supportive.” Bee editorial page editor Stuart Leavenworth defended the cartoon in a response to the letter:
Jack Ohman’s cartoon of April 25 made a strong statement about Gov. Rick Perry’s disregard for worker safety, and his attempts to market Texas as a place where industries can thrive with few regulations. It is unfortunate that Gov. Perry, and some on the blogosphere, have attempted to interpret the cartoon as being disrespectful of the victims of this tragedy. As Ohman has made clear on his blog, he has complete empathy for the victims and people living by the plant. What he finds offensive is a governor who would gamble with the lives of families by not pushing for the strongest safety regulations. Perry’s letter is an attempt to distract people from that message.