5 miles cleared for bomb detonation

TRAPPER CREEK — If your house shook close to 2 a.m. Saturday, it wasn’t an earthquake; it’s just what happens when you detonate 550 pounds of dynamite.

Alaska State Troopers reported in a press release that they went to Mile 3.5 of Petersville Road at 3:45 p.m., Friday. There they talked to a property owner who had requested their help disposing of the explosives, which were being stored in an old, abandoned station wagon.

“It’s been sitting in that car since about ’96, but prior to that he had bought this surplus boxcar that was surplus from the railroad,” said AST spokeswoman Beth Ipsen. The dynamite came with the boxcar.

“He moved it to the abandoned car and it just sat there since ’96 and over time it crystallized and became unstable,” Ipsen said.

District 4 Fire Chief Ken Farina, who oversees the Talkeetna, Willow and Trapper Creek fire departments, was incident commander for the eventual evacuation. He said the decay of the dynamite was why the operation moved with a sense of relative urgency.

“It was very unstable, that’s why it had to be dealt with,” Farina said.

But 550 pounds of dynamite makes the kind of blast that needs some important officials to sign off on it. Farina said the Mat-Su Borough had to get the OK from the borough manager and, he thinks, state officials had to run it by the governor.

After surveying the scene, troopers called in a bomb disposal team from Elmendorf Air Force Base. While they waited, they evacuated the homeowner who’d summoned them and another nearby home to clear a 400-yard radius.

The team recommended widening the radius to 6,600 feet, or nearly 5 square miles, an area that included about 50 homes. Most everyone seemed to agree that getting far away from the blast was a good idea.

“We had one individual that gave us a hard time, but the troopers took swift care of that,” Farina said.

A Red Cross press release said about 30 local residents rested on cots and received beverages and snacks at the Red Cross shelter set up at Trapper Creek Elementary Friday night. Residents were able to return to their homes around 2:30 a.m., Saturday.

Six Mat-Su volunteers, five from the Upper Susitna team and one Field Supervisor from Palmer, assisted clients and managed the shelter, according to the Red Cross press release.

Not everyone evacuated sought shelter at the school, Farina said.

“Some people came to the school and then they didn’t want to stay there so they got in their cars and went to someplace other than where they lived,” he said.

Other agencies involved in the operation included the FBI and the state’s Division of Forestry, which he called in case the blast touched off a forest fire, Farina said.

Ipsen said troopers sent in a helicopter, which flew over the area using infrared equipment to make sure the area was fully evacuated.

At 2 a.m., the Elmendorf team detonated the station wagon. The car was incinerated in the blast, troopers report.

Farina said the explosion was immense. It shook the elementary school and his wife told him she could feel it at their house — about six miles away, as the crow flies.

“Other people that I saw when I had a cup of coffee at Latitude 62 this morning were talking about it,” Farina said Saturday. “They were like, ‘man what was that sonic boom?’ Or they were like, ‘man that was a big earthquake.’”

As for property damage, windows were blown out of a nearby home, one of the two that was evacuated initially but not the one belonging to the man who owned the station wagon.

“It was from the shockwave, it wasn’t from flying shrapnel or anything like that,” Ipsen said.

Troopers say no other damage was reported immediately. Neither he nor Ipsen could remember an incident in which more ordinance was disposed of at one time.

“We have evacuation for unexploded ordinances or sometimes somebody’s cleaning out their garage and finds something,” Ipsen said. “But not to this amount.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.