Technicians implode old lab chemicals

Wednesday, April 16, 2003

Tension mounted Tuesday afternoon while late afternoon clouds churned and went black and hail-green, and explosives experts very gently carried a jar of potentially explosive crystals from a lab at the college in McCook.

The "Boom!" caused by the controlled destruction of the crystallized picric acid, about 8 p.m., would have been lost in the thunder if the storm hadn't subsided just a bit as the technicians imploded the crystallized acid onto itself in a ball of fire.

"It went well," said Lee Jacobson, a hazardous devices technician with the Nebraska State Patrol, despite having to compensate for the wind, heavy rain and muddy roads.

Rain turned the county road to the city's firing range northeast of the McCook Airport into slimy gumbo, and Jacobsen said technicians had to compensate for low cloud cover that would prevent the explosion's pressure wave from going straight up.

"It was nice that the ground was wet," Jacobson said. "That helped reduce vibrations through the ground."

Emergency personnel had called the county for a large tractor to help pull emergency vehicles through the mud, and Jacobson said he appreciated the tractor being there. Not only, he said, to pull everyone out of the mud, but also to transport someone in case of an accident.

"When picric acid crystallizes," said technician Sgt. Jud McKinstry of Lincoln, "it's unstable and it's sensitive." He added, "And it goes 'BOOM!' very easily."

McKinstry said the normally liquid picric acid had crystallized in a glass quart jug in a lab at the college. "It's nasty stuff when it crystallizes," he said.

"Picric acid has the explosive equivalency of TNT," the technician said.

Where the jug was located at the college, McKinstry said, it could have blown out windows, knocked doors off hinges and caused structural damage to the building.

McKinstry said it is not uncommon for picric acid to be in labs or hospitals. "There's probably no chemical lab in the state without picric acid," he said. "It's not unusual, but the only places we find it are in schools labs or hospitals," he said.

It's often overlooked and it's not used often, McKinstry said. It may have been included in a lab kit purchased when labs were put together, he said.

There are legitimate uses for the chemical, he said, including some photography developing processes and as a stain for X-rays. "No one has ever been able to tell me what it's used for in a school lab," McKinstry said. "And 99 percent of the time, when we find it, it's crystallized."

McKinstry's team mobilized personnel and equipment from the McCook Police Department, McCook Fire and Rescue, the State Patrol and Red Willow County's hazardous materials response team. Barnett Hall was evacuated and police officers told neighbors close to the college on East Fifth to stay in their homes and away from windows.

McKinstry and his technicians backed a trailer, equipped with a large blue cone, to the west door of Barnett Hall. In and out ... bomb technicians with equipment... in and out ... firefighter/paramedics wearing airpacks ... The clouds swirled ... gray, green. Lightning, thunder, rain. Heavy rain ... gusty wind ...

At 5:45 p.m., McKinstry and his crew came out for the last time. It will all seem to take a lot of time, McKinstry explained before the process even began, "but time's on our side. We take our time and do it right, step-by-step."

There's lots of planning to the procedure, he said, including determining the shortest, most expedient route from the location to the detonation site. It takes time to brief support personnel.

"That's the way it needs to be," McKinstry said, adding, "We do it one step at a time. We like to go home at night."

McKinstry and his technicians and an entourage of emergency and law enforcement vehicles -- with red lights reflecting off wet streets and casting zig-zags of light through swaying branches -- threaded their way slowly through neighborhoods, past Community Hospital, toward the county road just south of the McCook Gun Club range.

Only vital emergency equipment -- ambulance, fire trucks and water trucks -- continued with the bomb trailer and pickup onto the county road that circles around the west end of the airport runway and back to the city's practice range northeast of the airport.

Earlier in the afternoon, the technicians had checked out the firing range and dug a 1x1-foot hole in which to bury the jug of crystals. The hole would direct the explosion's pressure wave straight up, McKinstry said, and would help cut down on fragmentation.

A counter charge with an explosive would ignite the crystals.

"It (the picric acid) can blow up on its own, yes," McKinstry said. "But counter charging it creates a higher shock and more heat. It disintegrates everything, vaporizes it all. There's no residue. Nothing's left behind."

Because of the rain and lightning, the technicians couldn't use the electric detonation charge they planned, Jacobson said afterward, but an alternate explosive created the same effect.

"It imploded on itself in a ball of fire," Jacobson said. McKinstry said his team gets three or four calls a year to dispose of crystallized picric acid. Jacobson said they respond to an average of two or three times a week to all types of explosives-related incidents.

All the excitement surrounding the picric incident in McCook, "is routine for us," Jacobson said, "But we don't let it become routine. We don't treat any incident as routine, because that's when accidents happen."

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