After spending eight hours removing 91 sticks of dynamite from a duplex on M.L. King Boulevard on Monday, police have one question — where did it come from?
Marshall Kernea was pulling out insulation in a half-closet beneath a staircase at 906 M.L. King Blvd. when he found a cardboard box filled with 8-inch-long, orangish sticks. He wasn’t sure what they were, so he took one to his foreman, Ray James.
“When we turned it over it said ‘explosives,'” James said.
James phoned another contractor, who told him to leave the stick alone after James described it. A few phone calls later, agents with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Chattanooga Police Department’s bomb squad arrived.
Capt. David Woosley and his team had the nearby buildings evacuated and went to work. He knew the job would take awhile after one look at the microwave-sized cardboard box filled with the powerful explosives already oozing liquid.
“Once it reaches this point, you could just talk bad about it and it might explode,” Woosley said. “The hard part’s moving it.”
Police do not believe there was any “foul play” related to the dynamite. They said the property owners did not know the explosives were stored there.
They are looking for the source of the explosives, estimated to be 10 years old. Woosley said they’re trying to learn if the dynamite was stolen or if someone purchased the explosives legally and forgot them.
Before Woosley’s team arrived at the scene, the construction workers renovating one half of the duplex had knocked on the door to the other side, where University of Tennessee at Chattanooga students Christabel Herron, 21, and Christina Khouri, 22, live.
“He said, ‘We have some dynamite over here and you’re going to need to leave,'” Herron said.
Already on her way to class, she grabbed her bag and texted Khouri, who was leaving class and stopping by home before heading to work.
Khouri rushed to the house and gathered some things, but as she walked to the front door with a box of her stuff in hand, she dropped the box. Police told her to be careful, too much impact could detonate the dynamite.
Later she laughed, recalling how the six-man construction crew had been banging hammers and saws throughout the other side of the building for nearly three weeks.
Bomb technicians coated the dynamite with a special solution, then carefully moved it to an explosive transport vehicle that shields bystanders if volatile explosives detonate.
The truck then transported the explosives to a police training site, where they were destroyed, Woosley said.
Woosley said if anyone finds something they think could be an explosive, they should contact police.
“We don’t want people to think if you inherit a house, barn or land and find some dynamite that grandpa bought 30 years ago, they’re going to be in trouble for that,” he said. “If you call us we’ll be happy to come check on it.”