3 ms·

I love the list of half considered excuses considered before landing on dynamite. They just wanted to use dynamite.

cyberax 2y ago
Yeah. They just needed more of it.
potato3732842 2y ago
In the early 70s it was common to use dynamite for all manner of stuff like this. I'm not gonna say it would have been routine at a small county highway department but in some lines of work it absolutely would have been. It wasn't cheap but it was cheap enough that a typical rural land owner would rather just dynamite stumps or boulders rather than tackle them with any machine small enough that you'd have to dig out around it rather than rip it from the earth in one go. You don't realize how much you miss it until you start out pricing the options for clearing rocky forest.
- bigbacaloa 2y ago
  Folks used it to clear old tree stumps too.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  And for the really big jobs there’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
- quanto 2y ago
  Your last quip fascinates me. Do you price options such? How is the pricing different under different methods?
  - lazide 2y ago
    Heavy machinery (bull dozers, excavators) have per-hour costs. Both in machine operations, and in fuel. It is usually in the several hundred to thousands of dollars per hour, depending on the size of the machines. Clearing forested rocky soil is right up there in the ‘worst case’ scenario, time and wear and tear wise. It might take 80+ hours in some cases to clear a couple acres. That is very expensive. With dynamite, it might take a quarter of that. Equipment requirements are usually much less - a big drill, and whatever needed to transport the dynamite and caps to the site, pretty much. And dynamite (if you aren’t dealing with all the paperwork), isn’t particularly expensive either. As long as you don’t need to worry about fly rock, shrapnel, complaining neighbors, etc.
- philwelch 2y ago
  So what happened to make it not as commonly used anymore?
  - lazide 2y ago
    People got nervous about all the stuff being blown up, and decided to regulate it to (near) death.
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    The political winds and demographics of the 70s happened. And then some overzealous hippies blew up a few bathrooms to much media spectacle and that was the nail in the coffin that got it effectively banned. https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/weather-underground-bombings https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/weather-underground...
- saalweachter 2y ago
  Also, dynamite doesn't last forever -- so if you are a municipality with excess dynamite that is approaching its end of shelf life, and disposing of it unused is tantamount to admitting you wasted money buying it ...
mschuster91 2y ago
> They just wanted to use dynamite. It's not uncommon to break up large cadavers so they can be eaten by scavenger animals before the rot causes olfactory issues or poses actual health risk. In Austria for example, cattle which died on the alpine pastures (about 20 a year) was usually blown up to allow scavenger animals to quickly dispose of the remains as that was way cheaper than hauling the carcasses off with helicopters [1], but after some outrage in 2001, eventually the government decided in 2004 that the practice would now be banned, in exchange the government took over the helicopter transport bills. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprengung_verendeter_Rinder https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprengung_verendeter_Rinder
- firefax 2y ago
  Firefox auto translate is super useful for pages like this where there's no EN equivalent, thanks for sharing. >If a cow or similar cattle ship outside the slaughterhouse by lightning, fall, illness or for similar reasons, it is up to the owner, i.e. usually the farmer, to ensure the transport and disposal of the animal body in Austria to ensure the protection of water bodies and an intact landscape.[ 1] In the Vorarlberg Alps, about 20 such deaths occur each year. If the carcass is located on an alpine pasture or at anywhere else that cannot be reached by truck, only a transport by helicopter is possible. It cost 15,000 Austrian shillings in 2001. This corresponds approx. adjusted for inflation by 2025. 1,500 euros.[ 2] >Although at least in Vorarlberg 80 percent of these transport costs were covered by the federal state, the farmer was only approx. It was customary to pay for the helicopter 3,000 shillings there instead to eliminate the animals by blasting it on the spot. This beat in 2001 only with 500 shillings.[ 2] Thus, the farmer was able to approx. 2,500 shillings (approx. 250 Euro) save. The explosion ripped the animal into smaller pieces, which should then be removed more quickly or eliminated by eaters such as birds and vows. The explosion was either by explosives, which in turn meant increased costs or by the farmers themselves. (It was interesting to see the term for this event is "Walexplosion" in German -- I cannot speak the language but I did enough Duolingo, paired with a trip to DE and Austria that I can jump between machine translation and a dictionary and understand things in the written form) Edit: The grammar of German seems to get translated quite literally, heh.
  - 2y ago

Yeah. They just needed more of it.

In the early 70s it was common to use dynamite for all manner of stuff like this. I'm not gonna say it would have been routine at a small county highway department but in some lines of work it absolutely would have been. It wasn't cheap but it was cheap enough that a typical rural land owner would rather just dynamite stumps or boulders rather than tackle them with any machine small enough that you'd have to dig out around it rather than rip it from the earth in one go. You don't realize how much you miss it until you start out pricing the options for clearing rocky forest.

bigbacaloa 2y ago
Folks used it to clear old tree stumps too.
ceejayoz 2y ago
And for the really big jobs there’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
quanto 2y ago
Your last quip fascinates me. Do you price options such? How is the pricing different under different methods?
- lazide 2y ago
  Heavy machinery (bull dozers, excavators) have per-hour costs. Both in machine operations, and in fuel. It is usually in the several hundred to thousands of dollars per hour, depending on the size of the machines. Clearing forested rocky soil is right up there in the ‘worst case’ scenario, time and wear and tear wise. It might take 80+ hours in some cases to clear a couple acres. That is very expensive. With dynamite, it might take a quarter of that. Equipment requirements are usually much less - a big drill, and whatever needed to transport the dynamite and caps to the site, pretty much. And dynamite (if you aren’t dealing with all the paperwork), isn’t particularly expensive either. As long as you don’t need to worry about fly rock, shrapnel, complaining neighbors, etc.
philwelch 2y ago
So what happened to make it not as commonly used anymore?
- lazide 2y ago
  People got nervous about all the stuff being blown up, and decided to regulate it to (near) death.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  The political winds and demographics of the 70s happened. And then some overzealous hippies blew up a few bathrooms to much media spectacle and that was the nail in the coffin that got it effectively banned. https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/weather-underground-bombings https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/weather-underground...
saalweachter 2y ago
Also, dynamite doesn't last forever -- so if you are a municipality with excess dynamite that is approaching its end of shelf life, and disposing of it unused is tantamount to admitting you wasted money buying it ...

mschuster91 2y ago

> They just wanted to use dynamite. It's not uncommon to break up large cadavers so they can be eaten by scavenger animals before the rot causes olfactory issues or poses actual health risk. In Austria for example, cattle which died on the alpine pastures (about 20 a year) was usually blown up to allow scavenger animals to quickly dispose of the remains as that was way cheaper than hauling the carcasses off with helicopters [1], but after some outrage in 2001, eventually the government decided in 2004 that the practice would now be banned, in exchange the government took over the helicopter transport bills. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprengung_verendeter_Rinder https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprengung_verendeter_Rinder

firefax 2y ago
Firefox auto translate is super useful for pages like this where there's no EN equivalent, thanks for sharing. >If a cow or similar cattle ship outside the slaughterhouse by lightning, fall, illness or for similar reasons, it is up to the owner, i.e. usually the farmer, to ensure the transport and disposal of the animal body in Austria to ensure the protection of water bodies and an intact landscape.[ 1] In the Vorarlberg Alps, about 20 such deaths occur each year. If the carcass is located on an alpine pasture or at anywhere else that cannot be reached by truck, only a transport by helicopter is possible. It cost 15,000 Austrian shillings in 2001. This corresponds approx. adjusted for inflation by 2025. 1,500 euros.[ 2] >Although at least in Vorarlberg 80 percent of these transport costs were covered by the federal state, the farmer was only approx. It was customary to pay for the helicopter 3,000 shillings there instead to eliminate the animals by blasting it on the spot. This beat in 2001 only with 500 shillings.[ 2] Thus, the farmer was able to approx. 2,500 shillings (approx. 250 Euro) save. The explosion ripped the animal into smaller pieces, which should then be removed more quickly or eliminated by eaters such as birds and vows. The explosion was either by explosives, which in turn meant increased costs or by the farmers themselves. (It was interesting to see the term for this event is "Walexplosion" in German -- I cannot speak the language but I did enough Duolingo, paired with a trip to DE and Austria that I can jump between machine translation and a dictionary and understand things in the written form) Edit: The grammar of German seems to get translated quite literally, heh.
- 2y ago