Reincarnated Unabomber

Let me give you a scenario. Say you are staying at a hotel in a small rural town. Maybe you are there to see some distant relatives or go to the cattle auction or some other random reason to be in a small town. You decided to sleep in a little bit, since you were out partying in a barn last night. You wake up, look at the alarm clock. It is almost 10 AM, and you are barely awake and then BOOM. Now you are awake and wondering if Osama bin Laden is still alive and back for round 2 in a small Arkansas town that has nothing to terrorize. Maybe it was the Unabomber reincarnated or the Russians. Wide awake and full of conspiracy theories, you rush to your motel window praying that there will not be a mushroom cloud in the distance. Your adrenaline fueled body pulls back the curtains and immediately blinds your eyes with the bright light of morning.

And it isn't a mushroom cloud, but still a cloud. Smoke is poring up in a column at the outskirts of the city. What is there is this town that can blow up? you wonder. Although you would have no way of knowing this at the time, the nearby Cargill meat-packing plant explosion. I guess something was wrong with the meat.

The explosion occurred because of an ammonia gas leak that exploded 88000 tons of anhydrous ammonia (the stuff the can be used for fertilizer, making meth, or bombs (so what was the meatpacking plant doing with it?)) Firefighters let the blaze burnout by itself, and many of the extremely small towns residents were evacuated. Nobody wants second-hand meth gas entering their lungs.