Dave wrote:FreeFlier wrote:... and was one of two or three blasters there who had destroyed old dynamite, so he was asked to tell how he'd done it. Also to tell about what had tipped him about a bunch of times where "old dynamite" wasn't.
I'll take "unresolved narrative hooks" for ten points, Chuck!
Please spoil some beans!
Most of the time calls about old dynamite turned out to be red sticks in a bag or box in the garage . . . and were road flares.
Though once it was at the house formerly belonging to a deceased logger who had done his own blasting . . . and was known to be a bit careless about safety precautions. And that's careless by
logging standards
. . . dad was a bit worried about that one: worried enough he went out after dark to have a look . . . there was never an explanation why he'd had road flares in the furnace room of his house.
Then there was the call when dad asked the standard question "What makes you think it's dynamite?"
"Because it says DuPont Ditching Extra on it, and on the box!"
"Okay . . . I'll be right out!"
About ten pounds of, indeed,
DuPont Ditching Extra, and starting to sweat.
The owner plowed up a big chunk of a field while dad went to town for a truckload of dry wood . . . they laid out a long narrow fire pile, carefully carry the dynamite out to the pile, laid it on top, put the box at the far end, added some more dry wood over the top of everything, and lit one end of the pile . . . waited for it to burn out, and inspected it for leftovers. It burned quietly and there weren't any leftovers.
One of the other times he hauled it out to where he was blasting, piled good dynamite over it, tamped (covered) the works with mud and set it off with the main shot . . . a bit noisy, but it worked. (The big risk with detonation is that the explosion will through unexploded chunks around.) The important thing on this one was that the old dynamite was evidence in a criminal case, so dad had to account for destroying evidence . . . the state magazine inspector issued an official order to destroy the dynamite as a hazard within thirty days, then dad, the inspector, the magazine owner, and a law enforcement officer all went to the site, they watched dad prepare the shot, then they all signed official witness statements that the dynamite had been destroyed as an undue hazard in accordance with official orders issued by an agent of the state of Washington and that it had exploded with sufficient force that it was unquestionably dynamite. They all expected to be called to testify, but the defense read the statements and stipulated the testimony!
The boiler episode i mentioned above the dynamite had been stolen about ten or fifteen years before . . . they'd never found it, and then someone went to scrap the boiler, and for some reason instead of just torching the smokebox off like usual, he cut the nuts off the cleanout door instead, and pried the door open . . . then he turned the torch off and walked away.
The EOD man from Vancouver (WA) Barracks came over to supervise disposal, and he's the one that told about it.
At the start of this seminar, the leader went around the room asking everybody to tell what they did, and what was the biggest shot they'd ever set off . . . got to this middle-aged man, and he sort of smiled and said "Three and a half million pounds of ANFO . . . "
Stunned silence, then someone said "My God! You could move a mountain with that!"
Soberly: "We did."
He was the head blaster for an operation in the Mesabi iron mines, and they'd been opening a new section . . . there was a mountain that needed to go, and after checking everything out, they concluded that the safest and most economical approach was to take the entire mountain and the block under it in a single shot, since they had the capability to do that.
BTW, that was set off with precisely two fuse caps . . . they primed with Tovex (a DuPont water gel) primed with detonating cord delayed with MS delays, and led the main trunk back to a flat-topped sawhorse with a hatchet laying on it. When they were ready to fire, they took the pigtail (two blasting caps taped into two small boosters and taped firmly to a short length of detonating cord) out to the bench in the back of a pickup, tied the pigtail firmly to the main trunk with a square knot and taped the ends down, then spitted (lit) the fuses and drove away . . . about ten minutes later, the shot went off.
They didn't use electric firing because there were always eddy currents in the ore, and with this arrangement, if something went wrong and you had to stop the shot, you could drive out there and cut the det cord with the hatchet! Whack!
--FreeFlier
