Things that go bang
almost in my backyard - thanks to dynamite
I saw this
statement on a Craigslist ad, and it immediately took me back to my days as a
blaster’s helper on strip mines around here. I worked for Atlas Explosive
Service Company. One of the largest suppliers of dynamite in the world or was.
The companies in the business of providing explosives like to change their name
or their location or make up a limited liability company to shield themselves
from the onslaught of lawyers intent on chasing them into financial ruin, and
with good reason. Things happen when you play with dynamite.
Some gets left
behind and found by the wrong people. Your inventory comes up short, and you
realize you have no clue where it went. These are just a couple of the common
reasons lawyers chase them. Other reasons may be more lame in comparison but
still affect people’s lives like back injuries like mine as they insist on the
tradition as they load boxes of dynamite to full and assume 60 lbs is a safe
level for one man to load or unload on a daily basis all day long, and then you
blow your back out loading and unloading the boxes as you haul across rough uneven
ground to load the holes or even to store in bunkers. This happened to me back
in 1987 as I was unloading a semi full of dynamite. I can honestly say that I never
left any dynamite unaccounted for while I was around that company but I did
suffer from a bad back because of those jokers.
My first days
working there were not an easy experience at all. But the lessons I learned wasn’t
from the workers but from the delivery people who apparently knew more than I did.
The doors of their semi-trailer would go up and a driver would climb into his
trailer and start throwing boxes at the rear of the trailer from somewhere within.
Some would land on the ground and those that didn’t make it were kicked out of
the back of the trailer by the driver onto the ground, all marked class A explosives,
and blasting caps was clearly printed on the labels. I was ducking as the
driver was laughing at me as apparently he knew it was my first day. I gathered up the boxes and but failed to find
any humor in his attempt to scare the hell out of me. He did let me know how
safe they were for the most part. By themselves blasting caps and dynamite
itself are fairly safe as long as they are never shipped together. Both are class A explosives but if they are
on the same vehicle have to be carried in separate fire proof compartments.
So we would get a
truck full of dynamite in or a truck
full of caps. Caps were light and easily could be tossed around but the
dynamite I dreaded getting in, mainly because of the nitro headaches one would
get from prolonged exposure inside a closed container with dynamite.
Dynamite is a combination
of nitro glycerin, perlite, which are tiny glass shells about an eighth of an inch in
diameter which provides a certain amount of oxygen needed at a crucial moment
of ignition to intensify the chemical reaction and resulting explosion, also sawdust
to disperse and hold the nitro in suspension till ignited, and ammonium nitrate
to also intensify the reaction of the explosion wrapped inside a cardboard
container to neatly allow the blaster to safely handle. This is all common
information lacking specific information as to quantities of each involved, or
a specific recipe. I would suggest and warn you that making dynamite, or an explosive
device at home has consequences which usually don’t turn out very well. No wonder they have a team of lawyers and change
their company name often, is it?
this is where electricity comes from -isn't it pretty?
The process of
making dynamite hasn’t changed much over the years and far as I know is still
handled in a traditional way Alfred Nobel of Nobel Prize is famous for, as he
was the inventor of dynamite and a safe way to handle the explosive nitro glycerin.
Nitro by itself has to be carefully poured into glass containers and not
allowed to get hot, or cannot be dropped and in the old western movies would be
suspended in a box full of sawdust with
test tubes full of nitro inside, hanging in the air suspended by ropes to
assure it would not bounce in the back of a buckboard and blow up a cowboy or
two. Accidents were common usually resulting in a loss of life, so Alfred Noble
having invented dynamite and a safe way of handling nitro is accredited with
one of the most important inventions of mankind. This allowed us to wage wars
and win without a major loss of life as just handling nitro had the same devastating
consequence of losing lives as it took to win wars. Dynamite was and has been a
major influence on the outcome of war, let alone the construction and extraction
of minerals and ores locked in our earth. Only one other thing has moved more
earth than dynamite in the evolution of man and that is the earthworm. Capable of
passing more material through its body in a days’ time, the earthworm will
consume up to ten times its body weight daily. This is according to Darwin who
exhaustively studied earthworms and when you multiply the weight passing through
their body daily and the number of earthworms in the soil, you can easily see
it would average millions of tons daily. And most of this is done in the first 5 feet
below us. Just another fact for comparison.
Dynamite is a relatively
new product having been developed in the last half of the 1800’s, and so has a
lot of catching up to do. But in the last couple of centuries has worked hard
to close the gap. A cheaper method of moving large quantities of material
allowed the industrial revolution explode so to speak as railroads were built ,
and factories could grow much larger and buildings taller as a cheap source of
materials was now available from a variety of different sources. Replacing horse
and man power and in a relatively short time, one person with a twist of his
wrist could do what it took thousands of hours to do. Alfred Nobel made
millions off his patent and was dismayed to a degree to see its use as a means
of winning wars and being used for an entirely different purpose than what it
was designed for. And so set up a trust fund to reward the most important influences
on peace and the betterment of man resulting in the Nobel peace prizes. I am only
telling you of all this , some or all you may know , as a means of helping you understand
, the importance of having explosives in our society , and its impact on our
lives.
We rarely hear
of explosives in our day to day to society, but I can attest to the fact they
are out there, and I would say that your chances of passing a dynamite truck
are pretty good in our area and more so due to the extraction of coal and
limestone due to surface mining of these products locally in our area. For the
most part they have it down to a science, but dumb shit happens. More of this
will be related to you as I go along on a maybe three or four part series I am
working on. I have a plan; just don’t know how long my plan is due to my
inconsistent use of liberating my tongue or my mind as the case may be. So daily
I intend to take you along on a journey on things that go bang, and what it
meant to me and partly to you, as we have a tendency to share the same space at
times. If not locally then globally as we both share the same planet at times. Although
there are a few people I have known to be completely alien and hardly a part of
the human race or act like it , and if so may be the reason they seem out of
this world, and if so will have to excuse me as this pertains to all the rest
of us here on earth. I digress; a mind is a terrible thing to waste but in my
case coupled with a tongue can surely be as explosive as dynamite, hold on to
your chair. Dad always told me I wouldn’t be smart enough to blow my nose even
if I had a head full of dynamite, maybe with all I have to say you might agree.
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