LAPD Bomb Squad are idiots

Interesting… Fire Departments usually think “if it is burning, it just needs more water, to put it out…” and in 90% of fires, this is true, but in the other 10% “Water is the last thing that should be used to extinguish the fire..” Fatal errors come from not knowing the material that is burning, and lack of training by the Command Officers…. Think of the volunteer Fire Dept, in that small town in Texas a few years back, that got a call about a fire at a Fertilizer OEM Plant on the edge of town… When they arrived they found a fire burning at the edge of an acre pile of AmmoniumNitrate… Arriving Battalion Chief decides to put it out with water… One hour later the whole pile detonates, because water on burning Ammonium Nitrate causes a catastrophic detonation to occur, after an undetermined length of time… What should have been done is to use the BullDozer to move the big pile of fertilizer away from where the fire was burning on the edge, by making a firebreak, between the two areas, and then spreading the burning area out to a thin layer, and let it burn itself out..
Just like in the Bomb Squad case, here… Not identifying the Energetic used in the IEDs before making the subsequent decisions on demo, and where demo should take place, well the facts speak for themselves… and there isn’t a portable Energetic Containment Vessel big enough to hold 5000# of Commercial Fireworks.. and ten pounds of TNT, for a Demo Charge is a bit excessive, especially with an unknown Energetic being demo’ed…A 1# capped PETN Booster taped to just one of the metal enclosed IEDs should have been plenty enough to trigger the demo of the whole load… 10# of TNT is in itself a fair percentage of the rating of most Portable Containment vessels.. Just look at the videos published online… Even if they had drived the whole load out into the desert to demo the load, they still would have destroyed the Truck and trailer, do to not knowing the composition of the load in question and look what happened when it was demo’ed..

 

The next part of the story… Turns out most of the reporting on the first day was not very accurate.. DUH… The actual Fireworks were trucked away from the scene, BEFORE the “IEDs” were demo’ed… The 10# of “TNT” was NOT the initiating Charge at all but the TOTAL Load put in the Containment Vessel to be Demo’ed… The “IEDs” were Coke can sized metal containers that were x-rayed to see what was inside, (looking for shrapnel type parts) and they robotically cut one to sample the Energetic, but failed to actually ascertain it’s composition, before the Demo occurred .. The devices were simple “Burning Fuse” initiated… Now they are trying to put the blame on the Containment Failure during the demo, and covering their collective Behinds…

 

The biggest issue with BP in large quantities, is containing the Flame-Front long enough to ignite the bulk of the Powder fast enough to completely burn before the containers break and disperse the burning powder wide enough there by lessening the burn-rate… BP does NOT Detonate it just burns very fast, and produces a ton of high pressure high volume of gaseous burn products… This causes the container to burst which cause the pressure wave of the explosion… The BP pressure wave and Burn-Rates are fairly slow in compared to High Explosive Pressure Waves and Burn-Rates.. This means to get the best effect you MUST confine the BP in ROCK or METAL or paper in the case of common BP Fireworks…

 

That is what they call “A Smok’en Hole in the Ground”