Random Musings > Grow Your Own

Dealing with hard packed subsoil and tree stumps

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a lower gear:
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_de_Florette : "Jean buys dynamite to finish the well, but an accident occurs, and he is hit by a rock and falls into the dynamite hole. At first the injuries seem minor, but it turns out the rock fractured his spine, and when the doctor arrives he declares Jean dead"

To judge from the speed with which Gerard Depardieu ran into the smoke from the blast, he could equally well have been killed by the fumes as by fly rock, which leads me to another cautionary tale:

A friend was learning how to mine slate. The miner he was with showned him how to drill a round of shotholes in the level they were advancing, how to charge the round with dynamite and how to connect the round up. They retired a very short distance; in fact a worryingly short distance. The experienced chap, ominously rather deaf, connected up the exploder. "Aren't we a bit close?" asked my friend? "What if we're hit by rocks?" "No. we're fine" was the reply, "Just hold a shovel in front of your face like this." BOOM! When they emerged from the choking cloud of fumes, my friend began picking the bits of sharp slate out his face and vowed never to be remotely as close again. He could hear tolerably well again by the next day but his hearing never was quite the same again.   

madcow:
http://www.youtube.com/v/eOwven0Rt94&rel=1       Blaster Bates for those old enough to remember had a cupboard full of stories like these.

a lower gear:
Around the 1920s in the village where I live, a group of young colliers (late teens) decided to welcome in the New Year with a bang and decided to 'ring a gate with dynamite'. Many colliers brought some explosives home in the good old days so they all had access to some. They met on a country lane on the edge of the village and strung dynamite all around a field gate. They had seen more experienced colliers insert detonators and wire up rounds of explosives underground and knew what to do. One lad turned up late and said he had some more at home but they decided that they probably had enough and besides there was not much room left around the gate after every lad had added his explosives, and they really had to act fast now to detonate it on the stroke of midnight. They retired a sensible distance and set it off as soon as they heard the town hall clcok some miles away strike midnight. The resulting enormous explosion scared the proverbial out of them and they instantly dispersed homewards. The local policeman visited many of their homes the following morning for he had a shrewd idea who had probably perpetrated the disturbance that had woken the entire village. Every lad had a plausible story - they were at home, or out singing Calennig [Happy New Year songs in Welsh], etc. They joined the crowd of locals walking up the road to the location of the explosion, expressing surprise and mystification. There was no sign of the gate - indeed, no sign of it was ever found - and many yards of hedgerow each side had also disappeared.   

rogerzilla:
A schoolfriend had a dad who did demolition.  When he was about 18 his parents went on holiday and left him two sticks of dynamite "to play with".  Luckily they had a big garden (read: farm) and he was the responsible sort, so he just made two large craters.

a lower gear:
A local newspaper in the 1860s carried a harrowing report of the conjunction of somewhat younger children and explosives. A collier bought a keg of gunpowder and brought it home ready to take to work the following morning. He left it on the kitchen table and went out to run some errands. In his absence his two children heated up a poker in the fire and inserted into the bunghole of the keg. He returned to a partly demolished house and two dead children. Their actions were deduced / surmised from the wreckage and remains.

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