Big boom in LA.
WATCH: Sky9 was overhead when police attempted to detonate a stash of illegal fireworks that ended in an explosion in the 700 block of East 27th Street in South L.A. https://t.co/KpWiAEoyqv pic.twitter.com/UbIXLDoZjh
— KCAL News (@kcalnews) July 1, 2021
17 Injured After Planned Detonation Of Seized Illegal Fireworks Ends In Explosion
Federal agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Thursday began surveying the damage and reconstructing what led to a Wednesday evening explosion in South Los Angeles that injured 17 people.
“I can’t speak for the entire nation, but I’ve never seen that before,” Ginger Colbrun, an ATF special agent, said. “And I’ve been working for ATF for over a decade.”
The explosion of a Los Angeles Police Department truck, caused after a planned police detonation of seized illegal fireworks, happened at about 7:40 p.m. at East 27th and San Pedro streets.
The explosion occurred after the LAPD had seized over 5,000 pounds of illegal fireworks from a nearby home. A 27-year-old man was also arrested.
Ten pounds of the illegal fireworks were placed in a specialized armored truck designed for controlled detonations
Moore alleged that the officers followed the necessary protocols, but “something happened in that containment vehicle that should not have happened, and we don’t know why, but we intend to find out why.” The truck is capable of handling up to 15 pounds of IEDs. There were 10 pounds at the time of the explosion.
The truck was rated at 15 lbs of explosives but 10 lbs blew it up, injured 17 people. and broke windows for blocks.
That seems like a major failure.
They didn’t say 15 lbs of what but the standard is lbs of TNT.
This is something that will need to be investigated.
A big metal container that was supposed to contain a quantity of explosives but failed catastrophically at less than that quantity.
This seem like a job for a forensic explosive metallurgist.
I just so happen to know one.
Re the twit, if that was an attempt at detonation, I’d hate to see what success looked like.
Some explosives are more damaging than others, some less. And as I recall, the answer to that question changes if you enclose them in an airtight container. In particular, it seems to be that black powder is an example of such a substance, which is why a fire at a fireworks warehouse in Enschede, the Netherlands, some years ago could level a city block.
My reaction to this event is that the people involved need to lose their jobs, or as a minimum be busted to rookie, since they clearly lack the training and competence for their current jobs. Anyone who sets off explosives in a crowded place, with civilians right there, is mentally unfit for the job. The fact that the container in question seemed to be — just barely — rated for the job, at least if you ignore all sorts of qualifiers and disclaimers, is no excuse. The proper procedure, which qualified individuals would have used, is to use the truck to haul off the materials to the middle of nowhere and blow the stuff up there.
It is a question of detonation vs. deflagration. When they use to do mining by hand when they wanted to move mountains, they used black powder which deflagrates. I.e. it burns rapidly producing large amounts of gas.
Fireworks use BP charges for lift and burst. In order to work correctly, they have to be contained. To make a star burst, you take some mixture (often BP with other pretty stuff) and make pellets. You place these carefully on the inside of the shell against the shell. You fill the remaining space with BP. Insert a fuse, then wrap the entire thing with layers of paper tape. The more layers, the stronger the shell casing. The stronger the shell casing, the higher the pressure inside before the shell bursts. When the shell bursts, the pellets are shoved out into a pattern.
So they had 10lbs of BP. Some of it as lift charges, some of it as bursting charges. All designed to make great big booms. They then add a little bit of high explosive, which is detonates. So they get all of that BP to burn, already under pressure, and then they contain it again.
Those maroons seem to have built one of the largest pressure cooker bombs ever. The good news is that it failed “safe”.
We didn’t have shrapnel flying 100s of feet at ballistic speeds. Yeah the truck and container were destroyed and the boom broke windows. It could have been much much worse.
True, but then the forensic explosive metallurgist would have to go to work for the the
ATFAFT. And then figure out how to blame white racist extremists.They didn’t say 15 lbs of what but the standard is lbs of TNT.
Since the contractor sold it to the gubmint, it was probably rated for 15 pounds of baked beans. That detail was published in a document that the contract linked to for reference because they knew no one would ever look it up.
I think every DOD contract I ever worked on had requirements that contradicted each other if you looked up the documents being referenced and the ones the referenced documents used for their references.
Reminds me of the NASA spec for the leading edge carbon fiber panels of the space shuttle wings — the impact strength requirement translated to “just strong enough to resist the impact of a raindrop moving at 50 mph”.
I been professionally setting up fireworks shows for little over 2 years. Also doing stuff outside of fireworks job. THAT to me looked like a lot more than 10 pounds of boom. Usually (what Ive been told) EOD leaves the top lid open so pressure has somewhere to go without generally causing issues. Mega dumb.
Seems like a weird place for a controlled explosion. Could they not move it or something?
They probably figured that this was a good place because it was a low rent part of town. Nobody “important” would be annoyed by it. I’m pretty confident that if this scenario had happened in Bel Air they wouldn’t have done the Boom In Place thing.
Left wing bomb factory
Fireworks is a cover story
Wouldn’t something like a Side Dumper dirt transporting trailer work better? Fill it full of loose dry sand with cardboard tubes or boxes to hold the explosives? place them in the holes, and if they explode, the sand absorbs most or all of the blast. The rest is directed upeward. If you mound sand over the top of each problem, the sand would minimize the vertical blast too, Better yet, since the trailer is over 30 feet long, widely separating the explosives will minimize the chances of sympathetic detonations.
If you see the helicopter shots of the LAPD bomb safe, it looked like a big egg, and there was a heavy safe like door that sealed the damned thing shut. Isn’t that what makes pipe bombs so dangerous? The tightly sealed space around the whatever they are trying to make go bang?
When I first heard the story, the reporters said the bomb squad put 5,000 pounds of fireworks in the thing, and that was what blew up. I was thinking that many fireworks would have leveled the entire block.
IDK, perhaps the “fireworks” weren’t fireworks? They looked pretty well made and containing an amount of explosive that would seem to make them unsuited for fireworks.
I hope they’re talking to the dude in the house. Maybe asking about affiliations to Antifa, NFAC and BML…? But given it’s LA, in Kalifornia, and would run counter to the narrative, I don’t hold out much hope.
I think the owner of the stuff was arrested on charges of having a “Destructive Device”. That’s a bit of a stretch; the Keystone Kops are who made it a destructive device…