Since the accident, some state lawmakers began calling for increased workplace safety inspections to be paid for by businesses. Fire officials are pressing for stricter zoning rules to keep residences farther away from dangerous industrial sites. But those efforts face strong resistance.

Chuck DeVore, the vice president of policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative study group, said that the wrong response to the explosion would be for the state to hire more “battalions of government regulators who are deployed into industry and presume to know more about running the factory than the people who own the factory and work there every day.”

This antiregulatory zeal is an outgrowth of a broader Texas ideology: that government should get out of people’s lives, a deeply held belief throughout the state that touches many aspects of life here, including its gun culture, its Republican-dominated Legislature and its cowboy past and present.

Texas is one of only four states with legislatures that meet as infrequently as possible, once every two years, as required by the state’s 137-year-old Constitution. From the freewheeling days of independent oilmen known as wildcatters to the 2012 presidential race, in which President Obama lost Texas by nearly 1.3 million votes, the state’s pro-business, limited-government mantra has been a vital part of its identity.

That is particularly true in the countryside. “In rural Texas,” said Stephen T. Hendrick, the engineer for McLennan County, where the explosion occurred, “no one votes for regulations.”

Debating a Fire Code

Texas is dotted by more than 700 fertilizer depots like the one near West. Many store ammonium nitrate, the fertilizer that exploded near West, which is spread on the soil to supply the nitrogen that crops need. Consisting of white pebbles that resemble coarse table salt, the chemical can explode when heated. In the wrong hands, it can be deadly. About two tons was used in the bomb that destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Fertilizer accidents are rare across the nation. Texas was, however, the site of the deadliest industrial accident in United States history in April 1947, when nearly 600 people were killed in Texas City in an explosion on a ship carrying ammonium nitrate.