Within hours of the explosion of the Texas City oil refinery that killed 15 and injured more than 100, FBI officials were ruling out terrorism as a cause.

While terrorism may have played no role in the March 24 BP plant blast, law-enforcement officials familiar with investigations of this kind say that it would have been impossible to make such a snap determination based on facts.

Within hours of the explosion of the Texas City oil refinery that killed 15 and injured more than 100, FBI officials were ruling out terrorism as a cause. "How do you rule out one possibility when you don't have any idea what the cause is?" asked one federal investigator familiar with such disaster probes. Yes there was a blast even earlier that was attributed to be an accident. But then that need not mean that the second blast too is an accident. Something similar to the two seemingly similar but quite dissimilar events one where Timothy McVeigh brought down a Tower at Oklahoma by blowing it up and the second where Mohammed Atta and his gang brought down the Twin Towers by flying civilian airliners into them. Can the two blasts at Texas be as dissimilar. We don’t know for sure as yet.

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In fact, they point out that it was not until eight days after the deadly explosion that the first federal chemical and safety investigators even visited the blast site. Even local police have conducted little in the way of a probe – leaving all of the primary forensic investigation to BP officials.

Texas is a "federalized" state, meaning local law enforcement leaves investigations of this kind to federal agencies such as the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Local police say they don't have the expertise to investigate something like this explosion and they trust BP and other petrochemical companies to do the right thing up front.

And yet, with so little scientific evidence available on the day of the explosion FBI agents ruled out terrorism as a cause, while admitted it would take federal regulators months to determine the cause.

"How do you rule out one possibility when you don't have any idea what the cause is?" asked one federal investigator familiar with such disaster probes.

The rush to deny terrorism as a possibility is reminiscent of FBI tactics surrounding the downing of TWA Flight 800 and the Oklahoma City bombing during the Clinton administration, said G2 Bulletin law enforcement sources.

"That unwillingness to examine terrorism as a possibility back then may have contributed to the disaster of Sept. 11," said one source.

At least two Islamic terrorist groups have attempted to take responsibility for the BP explosion in Texas City. But the FBI denies they had any involvement in the blast.

Story and Photo Credit: World Net Daily