APPLIED PYROMANIA

Trust me, I’m a professional. Blowing stuff up is one of the few marketable skills I retain from the military. While the practical applications for high explosives in both martial and commercial endeavors are well established, such volatile stuff also makes a simply splendid way to kill a lazy Saturday afternoon with your kids.

My rural farm and my wife are the only two good investments I have ever made. I was ever-deployed someplace saving the world, and my bride is a fastidious money manager. As I have never really understood the stock market, we leveraged our nest egg into a modest piece of rural Mississippi dirt.

The farm is a big wooded valley sporting rugged old growth forest. Slicing through the middle is a small year-round creek. This creek was originally subdivided by a dozen robust beaver dams.

The local Soil Conservation Service came out and surveyed the place for free. They told us where to site a permanent dam and divined its manifest geological particulars. Aside from seemingly limitless piles of dead terrorists, this represents one of the precious few examples wherein I got some tangible return on the frankly breathtaking volume of taxes Uncle Sam demands. Now all that remained was to remove the fruits of the beavers’ toil so we could move in with a track hoe and dirt pan.

Technical Details

Pre-9/11 it was easier to buy explosives than it was to purchase a handgun. At least in the Deep South, all you needed was a driver’s license and an excuse. A quick trip to a neighboring town to meet a licensed explosives dealer did the trick. No kidding, back then we did the deal, paperwork and all, in the parking lot of a church. Ah, the good old days.

These were binary charges. The solid component came in a green plastic cylinder looking eerily similar to your kids’ bottles of bubble stuff. The liquid bit came in a separate container. When separated these two components were fairly inoffensive. Once onsite you simply opened the screw top off the explosive charge, poured in the liquid and replaced the cap.

A dirty little secret is it’s actually quite easy to improvise explosives from industrial farm chemicals. The challenge is acquiring the material needed to precipitate a high-order detonation. In this case, blasting caps and det cord did the deed.

Blasting caps look vaguely like cartridge cases and can be fired via an electrical current or a length of time fuse. Detonating cord is simply magnificent stuff. Det cord has a PETN explosive core, resembles thick clothesline and is waterproof.

To prep these charges for detonation, you wrap a length of det cord around the charge and secure it in place with duct tape. You then form a bight in the other end of the det cord around a blasting cap and secure it with duct tape as well. We then bored a hole deep into the beaver dam using a hefty steel rod.

You need to get the explosive underneath whatever it is you want moved. You then snake the det cord out someplace dry and affix the cap. Though Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer would likely spontaneously conflagrate at this revelation, my two young sons aged 6 and 10 helped me rig my charges. With meticulous supervision, they even did one each solo. Nonetheless, they remain productive law-abiding adults today.