We have a local character who is quite a skilled mechanic as well as a licensed blaster. He did a lot of specialized drilling and blasting in quarrying and heavy construction work, and even in "retirement", gets calls to come in as a consultant. He has a good sized shop at his place and he used to buy large air compressors and rock drills in need of overhaul each summer/fall, overhaul them thru the winter, and either sell them or put them out on rent during the next working season.
This fellow was a prince to our son's Cub Scout pack, letting the pack cut Christmas trees off his lot to sell, and not charging anything for the trees. In the local area, he has a mixed reputation. Some think the world of this fellow, as we do, and others have an entirely different opinion of him.
Once, years ago, on our railroad, we had a problem with beavers. The beavers, being no fools, seized an opportunity for a quick way to make a large pond. To do this, the beavers dammed the mouth of a large concrete box culvert that ran under a high fill section with the track on top. The result was the fill section, which was never designed to be a dam, became one. The fill section was about 25 feet above the grade of the land on either side of it at the point where the box culvert ran through it.
Water impounded against the fill section and made a pond for the beavers that covered several acres. The problem was that the track lay on an easement in NY City watershed lands, and getting rid of the beaver dam was going to require lengthy permit applications and similar. As an engineer familiar with earthen dams and similar from hydroelectric work, I was asked to take a look. I saw water had "piped" through the fill section (embankment) and was spurting with substantial flows. I knew it was a short time until the whole fill section would give way. The box culvert was dammed so solidly (it was about 8 ft square) that we walked into it and saw the mass of sticks and mud the beavers had closed it with. Very little flow came through.
We came up with all sorts of ideas as to how to deal with the beaver dam before the railroad fill section gave way. NYC watersheds was unimpressed with the idea that there might be a huge gush of mud, debris, coal cinders and clinkers (used as fill to build up that high fill embankment) into their reservoir and was not any help in the matter. Winter set in, and the pond froze over. That is when the local blaster got into the act. I got told to stay away from the railroad as, being a P.E., if I got caught up in the un-permitted removal of the beaver dam, I could wind up in some trouble.
What did occur was my buddy and the blaster walked out onto the ice, measuring off from the center of the track to the approximate toe of the embankment or fill section. They had established the centerline of the culvert. At this location, they chopped a hole in the ice. They cut down a sapling (locally known as a "popple"), limbed it, and fastened a charge of dynamite to the end of it. The ran the wires from the blasting cap up the sapling. The sapling with the charge was then shoved straight down thru the hole in the ice until it hit bottom. As they told it to me, the first charge they set off did not do much, if anything, to removing the dam at the mouth of the culvert. The risk was too heavy a charge would take out the whole embankment. A second charge, a bit heavier, was set off in the same manner. This did the trick. As they told me later, it was like flushing the world's biggest toilet. The mass of sticks and mud damming the mouth of the culvert blew through the culvert followed by a gush of muddy water and then the clear water as the pond drained. With that, the ice over the pond all gave way.
I have a soft spot for beavers, and really did not want to see them harmed. I wanted to live trap them and relocate them, but even that activity in the watershed area was tied up with permits and applications. My buddies felt bad about the beavers, as doing away with their pond in winter was possibly a death sentence for them.
This same blaster had another story. It seemed for a time, his work took him out of state for a week to 10 days at a time. His wife was at their home, where he had his shop along with a "powder magazine". As the story went, the blaster came home after being off working for 10 days or so, and his wife had "gotten religion". His wife confronted him, told him some mumbo-jumbo, and said God had commanded her to kill him because he was evil, or something on that order. The blaster realized his wife was not kidding around. He told his wife to pack her things and get out in 10 minutes. He went to his magazine and got a stick of dynamite and a blasting cap and came back into his house. He got the cap into the explosive in front of his wife, and told her to take her suitcase and get out, never to return or bother him again. He said if she was not gone in the next few minutes, he'd drag her out into the woods and blow her carcass to bits such that not even the coyotes and crows would be able to eat any of it. She realized her husband was just as serious as she was, and scrammed.
When my son's Cub pack was getting their Christmas trees off this fellow's lot, some people made reference to this incident. I still have a key to this fellow's gate, and he is first rate in our book. He did tell me he had pretty much gotten out of any blasting as he was having "nitro headaches", and then some kind of nervous system disorder as a result of prolonged exposure to the explosives.
Another friend of mine, not knowing anything of the blaster and how he solved his marital dischord, gave me a tee shirt. It says: "There are very few problems that cannot be solved by a suitable application of high explosives". In this day and age, wearing a shirt with that on it could get a person in trouble.
Back in 1987, I had an incident with a truckload of explosives. It was a winter day, in the pre-cell phone era. I was driving a Power Authority Bronco and drove to a convenience store between Kingston and Saugerties, NY to make a phone call to my field office. There is a large powder magazine in that vicinity for Austin Explosives, a supplier of explosives to the construction and quarrying industries. We'd see their trucks on the local roads fairly often. As luck would have it, the parking lot of the convenience store was iced over. I parked, went in, made my phone call and got back into my Bronco. As I crept out of the parking lot, I pulled abreast of a "box truck" from Austin Explosives, with the orange placard warning that it carried explosives. Unfortunately, the parking lot had a good pitch for drainage running across my line of travel. Despite being in four wheel drive and creeping along, the Bronco started to side-slide. It came to rest gently against the Austin Explosives truck, held off by the swing-out mirror. No damage to either vehicle. I got out of the Bronco and found the driver of the explosives truck was in the cab of his truck. He told me he'd been stuck on the ice and had side slid to where he was a little earlier. In fact, he had no idea I'd landed my Bronco against his truck as it was that gentle a process. He'd been reading his newspaper and listening to the radio, waiting for a tow. In those days, there was no process to turn this sort of "collision" into a "reportable incident" with "emergency responders". I went back into the convenience store and asked who to call for a wrecker. A tow truck from a local body and fender shop appeared in about 15 minutes. The driver and his helper started paying out winch cable to pull my Bronco sideways off the explosives truck. When the wrecker driver's helper saw the placards on the explosives truck, he started to yell as to how he did not want to get blown up. The fellow working in the convenience store came out, saw the situation and also started to yell and run away. We tried to tell them both there were no caps on the truck by law, and nothing was going to happen. They were unconvinced and ran off the parking lot- the convenience store guy still in his white apron.
A passer-by walked onto the lot and said he wanted to buy a Lotto ticket and smokes. He hollered at the two guys who had run off the lot and onto the shoulder of the road, telling them he'd worked in quarries and knew there was no way the truck could explode as there were no blasting caps on it. This passerby grabbed the hook on the winch cable and started under my Bronco to hook it around what he could so the wrecker could drag the Bronco free. This was done, I paid the wrecker driver and got a receipt. The explosives truck driver saw no damage to his truck and that was the end of the "incident". The Bronco crabbed its way off the lot, and I was on my way.
I used to keep a couple of empty boxes from the explosives we used on one job in the back of my Power Authority Bronco. These used to get noticed by guys from corporate when I'd take them out on my jobsites. They'd sometimes ask if it was "safe" to ride in my Bronco. I found out that the boxes are supposed to be destroyed to get rid of the batch numbers as there is some kind of accounting process for explosives.
We had another character who lived in his junkyard between Prattsville and Lexington, NY. This guy is long dead. He was a licensed blaster, and as the local legend goes, he got into trouble one July the 4th for giving out blasting caps and dynamite to local young fellows to celebrate the 4th with. Another fellow, a local well driller, and also a licensed blaster, was celebrating the 4th of July years ago on his own land. He was setting off smaller charges of dynamite and blowing empty 55 gallon drums up into the air. Someone called the NY State Police, who showed up and confronted him. He had been drinking with his family and friends and did not see that he was hurting anything by blasting empty drums into the air on the 4th of July. The troopers told him to cease and desist, knowing he was a licensed blaster and lawfully had the explosives. His immortal remark to the troopers was something like: "And what if I don't ? What are ya gonna charge me with ? B W I ?" The troopers hadn't heard of "B W I", so asked him what that was. His answer was "blasting while intoxicated". He then told the troopers to get off his land, and said he'd broken no laws, and kept on celebrating as he had been.