Like a house on fire...

[ebenbrooks]

They're burning the Escondido bomb house.

My question about all this is: why the heck are they burning explosives?!? Doesn't burning explosives make them, ya know . . . EXPLODE?!?EDIT 12/9: Thanks for all the responses and info. I guess my explosives-fu was weak. ;-) I appreciate the clarifications. Sorry for not responding individually, but I'm

Comments

[violet_tigress1]

I would think so

[darrelx]

Burning explosive material like PTEN (which they found a lot of there) is the safest way to destroy it... it needs a concussive charge to make it detonate, otherwise it just burns.

Most "explosive" chemicals will only explode if contained and compressed while they burn. Gunpowder, for example, was used for "flash powder" in early photography, but when contained inside a chamber, it would cause an explosion.

[wrenn]

Yup. Jeff (my ex) had many a story of defusing bombs. -- "first we carefully removed the detonator... then we moved the bomb to a safe location and burned it.... "

[wrenn]

It would depend on the type of explosives. (more TMI - my ex husband was munitions/EOD - explosive ordinance disposal - in the airforce.)

The house is full of 'bomb making chemicals' not bombs, from what I can find. also - that they are home made.

I am a lay person in this, but it seems from what I can gather, they think that a 'fast hot fire' will destroy the chemicals with little (not no) possibility of explosions. It is possible.

[drewkitty]

An explosion results from rate of combustion and is augmented by compression.

Light a firecracker and hold it in your palm. Ow! Your hand will be burned. Most of the energy however will go off in other directions.

Light a firecracker and close your fist. Have a friend with a tourniquet standing by and learn to live without a hand. All of the energy is transferred to your hand and has nowhere to go, except into making chunks out of perfectly good flesh.

C4 can be burned in a campfire quite safely. Black powder and precursor chemicals burn hot and fast, but often burning them (without putting them in a barrel, firearm action, etc.) is precisely the way to get rid of them.

This is also why ammunition magazines are small weak buildings in the open surrounded by sloped earth berms which deflect the hopefully hypothetical blast upward.

[wrenn]

... And also why powdermills were built a certain way. There are extant powdermills from the gunpowder manufacturing days of the Dupont Co. in Delaware. They built buildings with three walls of stone, a flat tin roof, and a wooded or tin front facing the river. Pics of the Hagley Museum and mills there : http://www.flickr.com/photos/pmclallen/4447878269/

(The Hagley grounds were within a mile of my house back in Delaware. Very nice place to visit, or walk, on spring/summer days, along the Brandywine River. )

[wrenn]

(some of the buildings at Hagley were designed where you worked from the outside using waldoes through 1 foot square holes in the walls. If an explosion happened, it would be directed up (taking off the flat tin roof that was not anchored to the roof tresses) and towards the river. (Where nobody would be).

[cerrberus]

Just last week a friend related using C4 to heat field rations- again, combusting unconfined to produce heat rather than confined to 'splode.