Move along, nothing to see here... a puny .003 megaton fizzle is all there'd be.

It seems the people working there weren't to worried about it. They didn't do that in one day.

Learnt Hick

No need for regulations here.

They shouldn't have evacuated either. Everyone knows you can't blow up vampires.

I wonder if terrorist groups got into the site, and how much they walked away with?

How do you all of a sudden 'discover' 6M pounds of explosives? Nobody knew what this company was doing? And I have to fill out all sorts of forms for the Dept of Homeland security when ordering some simple chemicals for our environmental laboratory? What a load of BS...

Ed,

I was thinking the same thing.

Imagine being the fork lift driver having to load it onto the 18 wheelers. Then, imagine being the truck driver taking wherever they're taking it to.... "NO SMOKING"

This was obviously an EXPLOSIVE situation that was DIFFUSED just in time. I did not know how sucseful that industry was ... (wait for it).......

Business must have been BOOMING in it's heyday... (snicker)... :)

@Learnt Hick - Obviously you have reading comprehension issues. The article clearly states that they were violating existing regulations regarding storing explosives. There is no need for more regulations, this was a simple failure of BATFE to enforce the regulations that already exists. Of course acknowledging that does not fit your agenda as your comment was no doubt meant as a political comment against Republicans when what we really have is the failure of a Democratic administration to enforce the regulations that exist.

I worry more about the security at the site and how much explosive material may have disappeared from the site than I do any risk of an explosion. After all, powdered explosive materials when they are not contained in some type of pressure vessel do not really explode unless set off by some type of detonator. If you threw a match in it all you would get is a lot of sizzle. I would be more worried about someone with ill intent walking off with large quantities of this explosive material to build bombs.

"Upgradedd

Move along, nothing to see here... a puny .003 megaton fizzle is all there'd be."

Do the math, 6 million total tons of a TNT based explosive. Megaton yield is based on a million tons of TNT. Tritonal is 80% TNT. The remaining 20% is aluminum powder, so an explosion would propagate well if it were to occur. So a potential 4.8 megaton yield if it were to explode; depending on mass distribution. Your post is weak nonsense.

Psst.......it's pounds, not tons.

denver bill 2

They shouldn't have evacuated either. Everyone knows you can't blow up vampires.

That would be 146 miles away in Transylvania, La. (yes it does really exist including a bat logo on the water tower)

Upgradedd, my apologies, it seems my reading comprehension is weak today. Six million pounds, not six million tons. I humbly apologize for my previous post.

JD, the issue isn't the introduction of MORE federal regulation for industries like this but the avoidence (sp) of eliminating what is already there. Proper execution of what is already on the books is all we ask. But there are those in both local and federal government that will probably argue that this company's lack of adherence to the laws on the books was due to the cost and if the regulations did not exist they would have been able to build the required bunker. I agree that ONE onsite inspection should have found that an approved storage bunker did not exist. and at that time operations at this site should have been halted or at least monitored 24x7 and fines levied until it was built.

Actually for this type of powder, which looks like rabbit pellit food, the worse thing that could happen to is for it to burn. It burns in a white hot fire when lit in the open. It doesn't explode, but anything in a tightly sealed bunker will cause an explosion. The biggest problem here is protecting it from flame. If dynomite gets to old it will sweat the nitro in it and become sensative to handle. I do not know if M6 does the same.

It seams to me that the facilities problem was taking the product in at a faster rate than they could reprocess. I would guess that the plece hasn't been inspected in a while. It takes a long time to amass 6 mill tons of this stuff.

the site is run by a private company, under contract with the dept. of defense, Camp Minden was a ww2 ammunition storage facility, at the time it was built it was in the middle of no where; and now our government wants to take over health care, and they lose track of 6 million pounds of gunpowder, wow.

hey yall the dept of defense is a job creator

No need for regulations here.

Learnt Hick - Perhaps they can pass another regulations that requires them to follow the existing regulations.

saxon

the site is run by a private company, under contract with the dept. of defense, Camp Minden was a ww2 ammunition storage facility, at the time it was built it was in the middle of no where; and now our government wants to take over health care, and they lose track of 6 million pounds of gunpowder, wow.

You just had to make a political statement out of this....Do you have any idea how many private companies are under contract with the Federal Government, or the number of private citizens who own land that the Government leases? I didn't think so.....

Nah, just enforce the ones we have. Of course that's difficult when Congress has cut funding to the enforcement agencies. You know, like we can now afford TWO inspectors for the entire country.

@Upgradedd Tritonal is specifically designed to produce thermobaric explosions...man that .0035 megaton blast is going to totally ruin every living thing anywhere close to it. In a macabre way, that's fascinating.

@Saxon quit being an idiot. PRIVATE contractors did this, and you're arguing that the private sector is more reliable. Can you say WTF? Also, its not gunpowder. Gunpowder is an accelerant, a low explosive. Tritonal is the high explosive found in the "MOAB".

@Learnt Hick - Obviously you have reading comprehension issues. The article clearly states that they were violating existing regulations regarding storing explosives. There is no need for more regulations, this was a simple failure of BATFE to enforce the regulations that already exists. Of course acknowledging that does not fit your agenda as your comment was no doubt meant as a political comment against Republicans when what we really have is the failure of a Democratic administration to enforce the regulations that exist.

Learnt Hick - Perhaps they can pass another regulations that requires them to follow the existing regulations.

Actually JS I agree with you....existing regulations should be enforced. Some oversight may be in order too. As relates to the story my agenda is this; There should not be 6 million pounds of explosives laying around outside. I wonder how much would have been laying around if there was no regulation or oversight. The only way to resolve that curiosity is to deregulate the outdoor storage of explosives industry and see what happens. So far the data isn't all in.

How did I do? Can I have a cookie now?

Besides.....I was first! LOL

so they amassed 6-7 tons of explosives, whit little or no oversize, until they had a "small" explosion ( whatever a small one is )... yet when i go to get a can of gunpowder to reload shotgun shells i get the paperwork from hell scenario and have to show em everything but my pecker....nice....of course they HAVE been in business for a whopping 7 years, i have only been reloading for about 40.

Ahh that's where I left it....

Kidding aside clearly someone screwed the pooch here and was not enforcing the rules like they were supposed to...ATF. Honestly I wonder sometimes why we have to have such a large alphabet soup of different agencies like this. I would think we could combine some (I said some) of them, save the operational costs, and potentially do a better job since there would be fewer agencies to dole out specific oversight and create communication gaps/barriers.

At any rate I think JS put it best. First and foremost if this is explosive powder there won't be any big boom unless the powder is contained to allow the pressure to build when ignited. Otherwise you will get some big fizzels and small scale fireworks show more or less, not a mushroom cloud and crater like some are thinking. Don't know the whole story but if most is like the picture above don't see much worry there. Evac was more abundance of caution than anything but should be no reason people can't get back now, unless there's something we don't see. Even many other types of high explosive aren't dangerous either unless you have a primer to provide the force to set them off, otherwise they just slowly burn and don't blow up. But in regards to someone walking away with it to make their own bomb or something that would be a little concerning. Again unlikely they would be able to make anything really big, possibly, but many small devices that would be the real worry.

But again sounds like someone wasn't doing their job and it wasn't just the manufacturer. Thats ok though, lets make even more regulations without following the ones we already have, maybe another gov agency, and continue to harass people at airports since that is obviously where the real threats lie. (facepalm)

It is time

@IA are you from Iowa? I have about 10 lbs of Unique and a few of 2400 right now that I didn't have to do anything other than pay them to get. Is there something I don't know?

IA.Scooter, The total is 3,000,000 tons. Where did you get 6 or 7 tons? 6,000,000 pounds...

Correction, 3,000 tons...

Holy cow, 6 Million tonnes of Explosives? Out in the open, next to highway 59?

That's enough to haul a man's ass straight to the moon!!!!

Now, who's the redneck behind this?

NB820-001

Don't feel bad, same thing happened to the guy keeping track of the stuff in the first place.

How did they not notice this before the bombs got numerous? I can't even find 2 pounds of dirt in my yard and they just find this out of the blue?

Not bombs, one ton boxes of pellet propellent. About 3000 boxes worth, and if you lit one it would just burn at about 2500 Kelvin not explode, now tightly packed in a warehouse gives a whole other out come.

Which is the big reason they moved most of it out side at this point.

As a former gunnery sargent I can tell you that if ignited the material would violently burn but would not explode. It only expoldes when contained...like in the chamber of a large weapon.

Gunny Thanks For Your Service.

We have similar problems up in Massachusetts, where, allegedly, state officials were not all born of cross-cousin marriages.

In one case, lax regulatory practices allowed a drug compounding company to illegally mass produce pharmaceuticals, use lax sterilization procedures, and ultimately ship contaminated drugs all over the country. As a consequence, over a 100 people are dead, and many more sick.

In another, a state-run, drug testing lab, allowed a rogue chemist to intentionally manipulate test results, as the result of of which hundreds, if not thousands of criminals may have their convictions overturned.

We assume states like Louisiana has inefficient [or non-existent] regulatory agencies. But these problems occur everywhere.

I think this story could have held it's own without name dropping "True Blood".

odb2 - Do we know that the explosives have been there for "all these years" and that there has been "no oversight", or is it just make-stuff-up-Monday?

dman - How incredibly bigoted of you...

Joemike - well let's apply some common sense to the situation here: 6 million pounds of explosives takes a while to create and move around. So it didn't pop up in a matter of days, weeks, or even months.

If there HAD been tighter oversight/regulations, it's pretty obvious this would not have happened, as the proper authorities would have known what was going on there.

And I fail to see any "bigotry" in dman's post. The only intolerance he shows it towards politicians that cater to corporate desires, which hurts we the people in the end. That isn't being a bigot, that's being realistic.

brokinarrow... implying all southerners are married to cousins and inbred is bigoted! I mean honestly....

Yeah the same place that has those unregulated deep water wells, but thankfully those are safe, with no accidents!

How are you going to keep the evacuation of an entire town a secret?

Alert every wackjob? We are talking deep south here. No need to alert.

dman-353357

How are you going to keep the evacuation of an entire town a secret?

You can't, especially in Louisiana. That's big news in a state that won't evacuate in the face of a Category 5 hurricane.

D Jahns - the police are already there, what do you think is going to happen?

netprowlerp - join the bigot club of dman.

You are absolutely right. We have all the whack jobs down here and we send them out to places all over America to do bad stuff. That guy that killed all the folks in the Colorado movie theater? Yep, he was originally from here. The Empire State Building shooting? You got it! Another one of our whack jobs we sent out. Get real, please. There are whack jobs everywhere. When something terrible happens in our nation the last thing I think about is pointing a finger to all the residents of the region and making fun of them. I might be from the deep south but I have the intelligence to know that bad stuff can happen anywhere. Now tell me, what if this stuff had been found by the Aryan Brotherhood up in Idaho? Does that mean all the folks in Idaho are ignorant? And by the way, learn to spell whack job correctly. Folks talk about bigots down here but boy I see a lot of them right here on this board from everywhere.

How do you know it wasn't? The key word in government oversight is "government", not "oversight."

Oh, I dunno Bill. Maybe because they have SIX FREAKING MILLION POUNDS OF EXPLOSIVES LAYING AROUND?!! Ya think that showed up in one shipment?!

Huh?!-1550743 - Denver's point is that this is simply another example of poor government oversight.

On August 27, 2005...

Anyone can be a sore loser. 

You, for example, bringing up irrelevant bits of history.

It's going to be 2013 in a few weeks. Don't forget to move your clocks forward eight years.

-god

On August 27, 2005...

Anyone can be a sore loser.

You, for example, bringing up irrelevant bits of history.

So, I can expect to never see "Bush" appear in a post of yours again?

Bill. Take the yellow pills, but not with the blue ones again! Over 60% of Americans believe that Bush caused the economic mess we're in but there's good news! Once we finally get out of this mess IF (And that's a big IF) Boehner let's us get out of it. His latest plan is to let us go over the cliff and then hold another press conference blaming Obama.

Looks more like a werewolf to me.

Gollum with hair."My preciousssssss"

Isn't Louisiana a wmd all by itself? LOL

Perry, read a little closer, it's 6 million POUNDS(3000 tons), still a lot. And the owners are not Korean, they are in Korea at the moment and are returning.

Okay, my bad. It was only 3000 tons in all. But, you don't go to South Korea in December for fun in the sun. You go there on business, and looks like they can't find anyone around except the janitor kinda tells me that the execs of this company are South Koreans. Maybe not tho. Seoul is a rockin town.

The Mayans strongly believe that the Earth, planets, nature, and even people followed different cycles. The word “cycle” means a round, circular, or repeated series of events. The Mayans believe that the end of one cycle means the beginning of another. The end a calendar cycle is a great opportunity for reflection and celebration. They often erected important monuments on these dates. There is nothing in the Mayan literature or archaeology that states the ancient Mayans believed the world would have a tragic or ultimate end. In fact, archaeologists have found inscriptions at Maya sites prophesizing events as far into the future as 4772 A.D, long past the end of the current cycle. The end of the 5th Long Count period was just the end of one cycle, and the beginning of a new one. Unfortunately, many people have misinterpreted it to be the same as the “apocalyptic” ending found in some Western religious beliefs.

Mayan traditions and scientific evidence suggest that December 21, 2012, will be a day like every other.

All the Y2K loonies will have a second wind. Let's not spoil it for them until the 22nd.

I wonder how many are actually scared of the 21'st. Hope nobody decides to "meet God" because of the loonies.

Nice pic for your profile, LOL!

And meanwhile ... back at the oasis .... the Arabs were eating their dates .......

@ Steve & Our Planet

I think my avatar is much better.

Yeah, because "Kaboom" was already copyrighted and trademarked by General Mills.

Trashcan Man, lmfao!

tex2c, you forgot to say "ad hominem" again....oh wait, that's because you are a hypocrit, lol.