Each of the 51,502 bags of fertilizer on the ship was marked in the same innocuous way: “FERTILIZER (Ammonium Nitrate).” There was also a marking indicating that the goods were “Made in U.S.A.” Nowhere on the bags were warning labels, no images of skulls and crossbones. The people who died in Texas City simply had faith that the city, state and federal officials would keep them from being harmed. They assumed their safety was being regulated. It was not.

But it wasn’t until six decades later, in 2011, that the United States Department of Homeland Security announced proposals to oversee the sale of ammonium nitrate and require anyone selling, buying or transporting 25 pounds of the fertilizer to officially register with the agency. This move came 16 years after Timothy J. McVeigh, a disgruntled Army veteran, used ammonium nitrate to take down a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.

Whether this would have been enough to prevent the Texas City Disaster is impossible to say. It would not have done what many of the people who survived the explosion said they wanted most: simply to have been warned by state and federal officials that dangerous chemicals, explosive fertilizers, were near their homes, schools and churches.

It’s a situation similar to West — where news is emerging that Texas officials were well aware that schools and homes were close to the big fertilizer tanks. Citizens of West of course knew about the plant, too — as one man told The Wall Street Journal: "It was always just there. You never thought about it."

Sixty-six years after the Texas City Disaster, it is finally time for this pathological avoidance of oversight to end in Texas. To understand how deep the state’s regulatory resistance runs, one need only to listen to the state’s attorney general, Greg Abbott, who often spearheads the Lone Star state’s rebuffs to federal imperatives. Earlier this year he was asked what his job entailed. “I go into the office in the morning,” he replied. “I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home.”

Long ago in Texas City, many of the residents were men and women with callused hands. They were patriots with enduring faith that America was, really, the safest place on earth. That the men in charge had put every safeguard in place. Perhaps in West, there were some who still had unblinking faith in the muscled-up industrial soul of Texas, that it had been scrutinized to the right degree, and that the lawmakers in Austin had made sure of it. It is time for Texas to invite the deep scrutiny, the careful oversight, that those people deserve.