[加拿大新聞] Century old explosives hidden in Main Street house rattle neighbourhood house, afternoon, earlier, hidden, mother

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Century old explosives hidden in Main Street house rattle neighbourhood

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/Century+explosives+hidden+Main+Street+house+rattle+neighbourhood/7014335/story.html#ixzz22DDgaxFp
Patricia Smith, 57, was having an afternoon nap in her living room after an early shift at Canada Post one day earlier this month. Her 93-year-old mother Marguerite was also snoozing across the room when a thunderous boom rattled the house.
“It really scared her. She yelled and said, ‘What was that? What was that?’” Patricia said.
At the back of her Vancouver home, a group of police officers crowded around her truck. They were examining its front hood and side panel, damaged by a metre-long chunk of plywood that slammed down after flying through the air and ricocheting off the power lines to her house.
What she found out later was that she was living just four doors away from a heritage house with ancient, delicate explosives hidden in its outer walls.
A renovation crew removing the exterior stucco to expose the original shingled walls of the home at 50 West 17th had found a tiny tin of blasting caps, small explosives once used to detonate dynamite.
On the afternoon of July 6, the police bomb disposal unit had scanned the tin with an X-ray and determined the copper detonators were floating in an unknown, potentially explosive, liquid. They rigged the tin with some of their own explosives and leaned a sheet of plywood onto the demolition package to “catch any fragmentation from the metal tin,” Vancouver police spokesman Const. Lindsey Houghton said in an email.
When the caps were detonated, the plywood shattered into dozens of flying pieces like shrapnel, said neighbour Paul Winslow, who was in the lane at the time.
“It could have had deadly consequences,” he said, noting two young children were playing in a yard further away from the demolition, next to Smith’s.
Police conceded the blast was larger than anticipated. The only explanation was that the copper detonators were surrounded by “some type of explosive matter that they could not detect,” Houghton said. “The [explosive disposal unit] officer said that there was no way, without risking the safety of the officers, to know what was in the tin with the detonators ...”
Officers on the scene apologized profusely and promised the city would pay for the damage, Smith said. “I was just totally amazed that this big board flew up in the air and travelled four houses over,” she said.
The Insurance Corp. of B.C. estimated the repairs to her truck would cost about $4,000, and Smith said she will forward the bill to the City of Vancouver’s risk management department, which deals with damage claims against the city.
Said Houghton: “Unfortunately there was damage, as sometimes happens, and there are processes to rectify and assist in remedying it.”
Four days later, the renovators found more caps and a bottle of volatile nitroglycerine.
The explosive disposal unit was called once again and this time covered the explosives in sandbags and cordoned off a one-block stretch of the lane.
“The precautions taken for the second demolition were not as a result of what took place the first time,” Houghton said.
Smith said, “They did everything by the book that time to make sure there were no problems. No one was even allowed in their yard the second time.”
Houghton said it is very lucky the 100-year-old explosives didn’t detonate at some point over the decades, as they sat undetected in the walls of the house. He said there is no clear reason why or how they were put there, but speculated they could have once been used to clear trees or excavate the site in the days before backhoes.
The “Beaver Brand” caps that were found were produced by Quebec’s Dominion Cartridge Company until it merged with four other explosives companies to form Canadian Explosives Company in 1910, which later became Canadian Industries Ltd.
Those types of caps are no longer used as they degrade easily, and their sensitivity to heat, light, friction and movement can lead to spontaneous detonations, Houghton said.
“They can explode with even the slightest shake or movement … especially ones that old,” he said. “The construction workers took a huge risk just picking it up and taking it to the backyard.”

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Patricia Smith holds blasted plywood where it hit the pick up after Vancouver

Patricia Smith holds blasted plywood where it hit the pick up after Vancouver Police detonated some explosives about four houses away. Neighbor Paul Winslow is at the right. Photo taken in Vancouver, B.C., on July 27, 2012. ()