Posted on 08/21/2008 5:13:56 PM PDT by NavyCanDo
CENTRALIA, Wash. - An explosive device with the potential to deliver "an incredible amount of destructive power" was found alongside tracks leading to Lewis County's Trans Alta mine on Wednesday, officials said. The Lewis County Sheriff's Office said the device was found by a Trans Alta employee who did not recognize it as a bomb and transported it in a rail truck to turn over to the supervisor. The device was a five-gallon propane tank with green and yellow wires coming out the tank. The wires were similar to those used in electrical blasting caps.
After arriving at the scene, the bomb squad x-rayed the tank, and removed a blasting cap from the device. The blasting cap had been activated but the powder inside the tank for unknown reasons had not detonated.
When asked whether he believed a coal-fired power plant about a mile away could've been the target, Mansfield said investigators have not ruled out any possibilities.
(Excerpt) Read more at komonews.com ...
Good grief. Centralia ping.
Looks like the Greeners are getting frisky.
I remember something about that now that you mention it.
Sounds like a teenager having fun. The power plant was over a mile away.
gotta be interesting figurin out whether somebody is just a dumbass, or very clever...
kinda reverse jigsaw puzzle ???
Ping.
I once hung out with some army EOD guys, which makes for a very interesting conversation, because so much of what they do is classified.
It’s not often you can talk with people who actually have to think before they speak. (Though boomer sailors take the cake, here. They positively start to twitch if you even ask them about life on a sub.)
One EOD type had to go through an elaborate court martial after almost shooting his commanding officer, legally. He was in a security vault, reading a document that was so highly classified that:
1) Only one person permitted in the vault. Sign posted on the door for no entrance under any circumstances.
2) Person reviewing document must have a .45 automatic on the desk next to him. It must be charged, that is, round in the chamber, safety off and hammer back. (Dang! They mean it!)
3) If anyone else enters the vault (and here was the controversy), the document reviewer must either:
a) Shoot them, or
b) Identify them, and if unable to, shoot them.
That is, there was a disagreement between regulations.
While he was in the vault, his commanding officer ignored the sign, and entered the vault. He was greeted by the NCO, one trigger pull from killing him, who to the commanding officer’s great good fortune decided not to, despite the regulation the NCO believed he was supposed to follow.
This made for an interesting court martial. It had to determine *both* whether the NCO was guilty of severely menacing the life of his C.O., *and* whether or not he violated the regulation *he* followed, that is, whether he *should* have shot his C.O., but neglected to do so.
Fortunately for the NCO, he was acquitted on both charges, though he and his C.O. rather lost their friendship after that, as you might imagine.
All this, and having to render safe explosives, too. Tough line of work.
And as well it has to be 90% of the time using just x-rays........what is the power source ? is it a collapsing circuit ? Anti-xray ? Motion ? tremblers ? E-Cells ? 555 timers ? Capacitor’s ? IED on IED on IED ? Proximity ? Command or trip detonated ?
Then and only then do ya find out if your smarter the the IED builder !
WOW !!!...Pucker factor in the RED X2...in a ‘security vault’ no less...
I got rid of more bad officers that way........:o)
The new owners of the power plant are in the process of shutting down the mine because of the low quality of the coal and will be bringing in coal by rail car for other states in the west. Could just be a disgruntled miner.
luckily most are dumbasses and blow themselves up 'practicing' ???
Lord knows what they had in that vault, other than the Ark of the Covenant.
But seriously, this was in Germany in the early ‘80s. Other than recipes, classified fuses, and other normal stuff, they probably had disarmament information about tactical or even strategic nuclear weapons, like heavy bomber bombs—not something you want the enemy to know.
From another direction, I gathered that the one thing that got EOD people agitated above all else was tritium. If it was ever detected while they were doing their thing, I gather the medical procedure (at the time) to treat them for exposure would make Torquemada queasy.
“After arriving at the scene, the bomb squad x-rayed the tank, and removed a blasting cap from the device. The blasting cap had been activated but the powder inside the tank for unknown reasons had not detonated.”
Couldn’t have been a lack of free oxygen, now could it?
Propane cylinders ain’t easy to turn into bombs short of bonfires, read this:
http://www.propane101.com/propanecylinderexplosions.htm
Tritium is actually fairly benign stuff. It's normally a gas, although in rifle sites and exit signs and the like it's mixed with a phosphorescent liquid.
What would most likely freak an EOD guy about about tritium is that it's a component in nuclear weapons. If it was detected, they'd know they weren't dealing with a conventional explosive.
That'd really increase the pucker factor for any EOD guy.
'Cept of course Squantos..
L
I have no recollection of that event Senator.......:o)
A few years back my wife and I were awoke at about 6 am on a Sunday morning by a loud bang! We both said "what the heck was that". I got up and looked around for something that had fallen on the house, but didn't see anything. A little while later I was driving into town to meet a friend for breakfast and saw what the bang was.
A house about a mile away had blown up from a propane explosion. Apparently there was a leak in a water heater valve or something and the propane accumulated. Then something sparked it. The whole house was literally just gone. All that was left was the foundation, debris and insulation scattered about in trees and what not. They found the bodies of the homeowners in the trees about 50 yards away. The ONLY thing left standing was the propane tank itself, which looked pretty much unscathed.
At the time, the assumption was that tritium exposure would be due to a nuclear incident, resulting in a cracked device. But it was the tritium that concerned them, less the nuke, per se, whose biggest danger is from a conventional explosives explosion. The second danger would be that such an explosion would blow relatively large chunks of nuclear material around the site. But that would be a problem that others, not EOD, would have to deal with.
That is, they would already know it was a nuke. But the tritium itself was what scared them. They did describe some of the SOP involved in exposure treatment, but I didn’t really get the details, other than they really didn’t want to go through it.
It was pretty surreal in those years. Even if a train or other vehicle was carrying a radium dial compass or other device, most likely a radioactive source stick to calibrate radiac meters, it had to be reported to the DOE. And everybody who worked at all with anything radioactive did (and probably still does) have to have an exposure chart in their medical records.
I heard of not one, but two soldiers who through utter brilliance, managed to screw themselves up with radioactive materials, in ways that nobody though anyone would be stupid enough to do, or was even possible.
As an NCO said at the time: “No matter how fool proof they think it is, I have known privates that could screw up a steel ball.”
The corollary of that is "Make something foolproof and only a fool can use it."
L
Correct....we do not “clean up” unless the threat of a secondary detonation exists. We render safe, dismantle and collect evidence but others in the DOD/DOE combined ARG teams would mop up after our part was accomplished in all but extreme situations !
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