Ely’s Inc. forgot that we live in a society.

The Bombs We Live Beside

Life moves at a gentle pace on University Street in Guide Rock, Nebraska. It’s a small town, the kind of place where the biggest daily risk should be missing the lunch special at the local diner.

However, for years, a very different kind of risk was looming, silent and invisible. It sat inside two massive, 70,000-pound storage tanks at a facility run by Ely’s Inc.. The tanks held anhydrous ammonia, a chemical so toxic and volatile that a significant leak would sear the lungs of anyone in its path.

The people of Guide Rock didn’t know it, but the place meant to contain this threat was a disaster waiting to happen. This was a physical and procedural breakdown that put an entire community on the knife’s edge of a catastrophe, all because this stupid ass company apparently failed to follow the most basic safety rules.

A Blueprint for Disaster

When a company decides to store more than 10,000 pounds of a substance like anhydrous ammonia, it crosses a legal and ethical threshold.

The federal government, through the Clean Air Act, says you can’t just wing it anymore. You need a plan. A serious, detailed, and practiced Risk Management Plan.

It’s no longer optional like how it was before Nixon. It’s the bare minimum promise a company makes to its neighbors: we will not let our business become your tragedy.

But on September 26, 2023, an inspector from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) paid a visit to Ely’s Inc.. What they found was staggering.

Ely’s had no real plan for the worst-case scenario. No analysis of what would happen if one of those tanks let go. They had no documented emergency response program to speak of and had failed to coordinate with local first responders, the very people who would be running toward the danger while everyone else was running away.

There wasn’t even a system in place to warn the public to get out of the way. First responders would be flying blind. The town would be a target.

The physical facility itself was just as bad. Those two giant tanks were sitting closer together than safety standards allow, creating a terrifying domino effect where a fire at one could easily ignite the other. There were no barriers to stop a truck from accidentally backing into the tanks and starting a chemical release that could devastate the town.

Even the pipes were a mystery, with no clear labels to tell workers if they contained super-cooled liquid or high-pressure gas, a mistake that could be fatal in an instant.

The Price of “Business as Usual”

So what happens when a company puts a community at such a profound risk? What is the price for years of non-compliance? In this case, it wasn’t a fine. It wasn’t a penalty. It was, essentially, a legally binding to-do list.

The document, an “Administrative Order for Compliance on Consent,” is an agreement. Ely’s Inc. agrees to fix the problems. They have 180 days to create the safety plans they should have had all along, to finally coordinate with local emergency services, and to either move their giant chemical tanks or install the barriers that could prevent a catastrophe.

No one is forced to admit guilt. No executive is held personally accountable. Ely’s as a faceless company is simply being told, under threat of future fines, to do what the law required of them from the very beginning. This is the cost of doing business. You roll the dice on public safety, and if you get caught, you promise to follow the rules next time.

This here be a snapshot of a systemic weakness. Across the country, in countless small towns, facilities like this operate on a knife’s edge. Our system of oversight is largely reactive. It waits for an inspection, or worse, an accident, to compel action.

It trusts companies to police themselves, even when the bottom line pushes them to cut corners on safety, maintenance, and planning.

What Real Safety Looks Like

Justice for the people of Guide Rock shouldn’t just a checklist of repairs at the Ely’s Inc. facility. Real justice, real safety, is a revised economic system that prevents the threat from ever taking root in the first place.

It looks like proactive and unpredictable inspections, not just ones that happen after years of potential negligence. It looks like penalties that are a real deterrent, not just a nuisance cost to be managed by the accounting department. And most of all, it looks like a system where corporations aren’t just allowed to promise they’ll do better after they’re caught red-handed.

The EPA’s order against Ely’s Inc. may have averted a disaster this time. But for every facility that gets EPA inspected, how many more are out there, quietly ticking, just waiting for a single mistake to turn a quiet Tuesday into a town’s worst nightmare? We shouldn’t have to wait to find out.

All factual claims in this article are sourced from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrative Order for Compliance on Consent, Docket No. CAA-07-2024-0145, filed on August 20, 2025.

Please fact check me by visiting this following link to the EPA’s website: https://yosemite.epa.gov/OA/RHC/EPAAdmin.nsf/Filings/59311FCB82A6EC9885258CEE006F8A48/$File/Elys%20Administrative%20Order%20for%20Compliance%20on%20Consent.pdf