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April 19: The Fire Plan Had No Fire Protocol
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On the morning of April 19, 1993, FBI tanks rolled toward Mount Carmel with a tear gas plan — and no firefighting response staged anywhere on the perimeter. Seventy-six people died, including twenty-five children, and who bears responsibility for the conditions that made that fire possible remains fiercely contested.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
April nineteenth, nineteen ninety-three. Six in the morning.
Tear gas as a siege-ending tool isn't unusual. Law enforcement had used it in standoffs before.
CS gas is a chemical irritant. When it's fired into a room, it disperses as particles and vapor.
Shortly after noon on April nineteenth, fire broke out inside the compound. By the time it was fully visible from the outside, it was already massive.
There's a distinction worth drawing here. The question isn't simply whether the FBI intended for anyone to die.
It's worth holding this question alongside another one, because the fire risk question doesn't exist in isolation. By April nineteenth, FBI negotiator Gary Noesner had already been replaced.
The nineteen ninety-nine civil trial was brought by survivors and families of those who died. They sought six hundred and seventy-five million dollars and argued the government was responsible for excessive force and for the fire itself.
Decades on, the specific question of fire risk and government planning has a clearer answer than some of the other contested questions about Waco, and that clarity is uncomfortable. The conditions for a catastrophic fire were foreseeable.
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