It’s amazing the things you can stumble across sometimes. Take for instance, the call I recently received.   Jim Thiele, a Special Agent for the State Fire Marshall’s office, called to ask if he could dispose of some explosives in one of our quarries. Jim had picked up a hand grenade from the evidence locker in De Witt and needed a safe place to blow it up. What better place than one of our quarries!  After all, we blast regularly, and are always willing to offer a helping hand when we can.

We chose to go to our Gooselake Quarry.  Its location is fairly remote with no close neighbors or other safety issues and Jim didn’t have to transport the devise any great distance making it safer for him.

Some might ask how a grenade ended up in the hands of a citizen in the De Witt area. This is where this story takes a strange twist, in my mind at least. As it turns out, the grenade was bought at a local auction! Can you believe it!!  Someone actually put a live grenade up for bid at an auction. It’s not known to me why anyone would even buy it.  Maybe they wanted a conversation piece for their coffee table or maybe they had a beaver problem. Regardless they ended up with a deadly explosive that could have hurt a lot of people.

We have helped the State Fire Marshall’s office with this office several times in the recent past but the process is always interesting. It is always an amusing demonstration to watch the safety measures taken by the explosives technicians, seeing how they trigger the device etc. Believe me, this wasn’t like an old John Wayne war moving where someone snatches the pin out with their teeth and lobs it into an

This time they used a device called a ‘disruptor’. Now that may sound pretty high fa-luttin’ but it is amazingly simple device.  What it amounts to is a short 12-gauge barrel on a stand. The primer is set of with an electric charge and it shoots a 3” shell loaded with a clay slug. On impact with the grenade, it detonated.  The grenade was situated in a pile of spoils so that the shrapnel could be recovered for examination. The entire grenade was recovered and will be sent off to the state’s crime lab to determine what explosives agent was used. It turns out the primer had already been shot once and the device was at some point later recharged to be used again.

The Fire Marshall’s office was thankful and intends to call on us again in the near future to spend a day or perhaps parts of two getting rid of other confiscated explosive materials. As in the past WQI will answer the call and do our part to help with this serious issue.