…would probably include a young student touching off the explosion that helps fragment a granite rockface so a new road can be laid down. I witnessed just this along with a small crowd of students this summer. Hard to believe but true. My employer is building new campus housing and some of the area has only a few feet of topsoil on top of granite, so they had to do some blasting before the could excavate. I got stopped by the road crew as they prepared to set off one of the explosions. A small crowd of students was there to watch, and the guy with the detonator coaxed one of the young women watching to come out into the road and flip the switch. There was a strangely satisfying deep bass ‘whump’ and the tire mats leaped into a jumble in the air as the students leapt back and cheered. On the one hand I don’t really find fault with this. On the other, I’m sure if the wrong people had seen it (or the right, depending on your perspective) heads would have rolled and possibly lawsuits would have followed.

I will also note that witnessing this all at close hand didn’t make me any more comfortable about being adjacent to this kind of work. Folks were smoking within 20-30 feet of the trailer marked all over with ‘this is explosive stuff, danger!’ stickers where they were storing the materials, and I was only 30-40 feet back from the field of tire mats they used to cover things up.