Can somebody "splain" this?

[PRB]

So, the police discover a house in Escondido, CA full of explosives. So much explosives, in fact, are in this house that they “had no choice” except to burn the house down, with the explosives in it. There are several other houses very close to this bomb house, the occupants of which were all evacuated while the house was put to the torch.

I don't get it. Of all the possible solutions to the problem of “a house full of explosives”, I would think setting it on fire would be somewhere towards the bottom of the list. Call me kooky.

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2010/dec/10/escondido-bomb-house-burned-toxic-testing-begins/ (http://www.kpbs.org/news/2010/dec/10/escondido-bomb-house-burned-toxic-testing-begins/)

[jmig]

That sounds sort of like the same thinking that Philadelphia mayor had when he fire bombed the house some Black Panthers were in. He burnt down the entire row of houses.

What ever happened to just removing the stuff?

[Dangerousdave26]

I think it really depends on the type of explosives.

If its loose as in Fertilizer it will only burn it is not explosive until it is contained.

If it is sticks of TNT they will explode until you break them in two then they can only burn.

Plastic explosives only explode when they are hit with an electrical charge. They burn if you burn them.

[N2056]

That was a local story here. The problem was that there was so much junk in the house that the bomb squad could hardly get around in their protective gear, and the stuff was all over the place making it too dangerous to clean up any other way! The explosives the guy was playing with were so unstable that when the poor gardener stepped on some of the powder in the yard it went off and messed him up pretty bad. That's how the whole thing came to light.

[Willy]

What Dave said, but with modern dynamite, you pretty much need a blasting cap inserted to provide the shock that it needs to detonate.

[TARPSBird]

Apparently the explosives experts decided that whatever was stashed in the house would either be neutralized by the heat or cause only low-order explosions after the house was torched. They also erected protective sheetrock walls coated with fire-retardant gel between the bomb guy's house and the neighbors' houses. Everything went according to plan so I guess they had some good people doing the brain-storming.

[PRB]

Ok, all that makes sense. Thanks!

[Emil Frand]

That sounds sort of like the same thinking that Philadelphia mayor had when he fire bombed the house some Black Panthers were in. He burnt down the entire row of houses.

What ever happened to just removing the stuff?
wasnt black panthers it was the Move movement and it wasnt a row of houses, it was entire blocks....... they had a bunker on top of their house and the cops dropped a bomb on it, though I think it was supposed to be a stun bomb of sorts not a fire bomb, anyway it started a fire and the fire fighters werent alowed to move in for fear of being shot at and the fire quickly spread, got to watch the whole thing unfold on local tv while I was living near there.