My high school physics teacher created a pond on his property with explosives. He even filmed the explosion. He did this back in the early 60's as I recall the story. He showed the film in my physics class.
He couldn't afford to have heavy equipment do the job. Back in those days you could buy dynamite at the local hardware store. There was a lot of dynamite out in farm country and the farmers were not real good at turning the cartons and ended up with a case of "sweated" sticks where the nitro had seeped out of the sticks and drops were visible on the outside of the sticks. This tends to make people very nervous.
He put the word out he was looking for dynamite and the calls started coming in. He drove all over picking up quite a few cases for free! The farmers were glad to get rid of the stuff.
He also got a call from a guy who wanted to know if he was interested in a bunch of military plastic explosive. The guy told him he could have it, as long as he didn't tell anyone where he got it.
When he figured he had enough, they went out in the swamp and dug 8 bore holes about five feet deep. Put in a block of plastic explosive and back filled with high nitrogen content fertilizer. Then they laid out a grid and started placing the dynamite in the grid.
They made sure the area was clear. He had his friends out around the perimeter to make sure nobody got near. He set the Super-8 camera on a tripod and pointed it toward the action and then detonated the charge. Quite an explosion.
The Sheriff showed up later and asked what happened. He just shrugged his shoulders and said it must have been swamp gas.:beatsme Sheriff responded that it better not happen again and left.
Nice pond. The only two issues he had was the following spring the 30 or so acres down wind of the pond looked like all the plants were plastic. All that fertilizer made all the plants un-naturally GREEN. The other issue was he had to build a fence around the pond since the explosion shook all the surrounding soil loose and the cows kept getting stuck when they walked down there.
My Father-In-Law, Brothers-In-Law and I did a bunch of work for their township blasting drainage ditches down through the swamps back in 83. We didn't make any ponds but blew miles of ditch. We were way cheaper than the quote they got to bring in a dragline and mats. It was fun the first couple of days and then got to plain old hard work carrying 5 gal buckets of Ditch-X (60%) through thigh deep swamp...
The BIL asked about trying to use less dynamite so I gave him the recipe for diesel and high nitrogen fertilizer. I was up at the farm a couple of weeks later and was riding the motorcycle through the pasture and found this huge stump about 30 feet inside the pasture fence. I thought this was strange since we had been piling stumps along the west fence. I asked the BIL about it when I got back to the house. He asked if I rode down by the swamp and I said no. He said to ride down by the swamp. So I took a ride and found a big hole down by the swamp. Still clueless, I asked why they dumped the stump there. He responded, "Thats where it landed."
They were out of diesel so they used gasoline, fertilizer and 7 or 8 sticks of dynamite in a snake-hole charge under the stump. Scared the crap out of them when the stump launched! I would have loved to see the looks on their faces when it launched
ointlaugh
It was probably the same look we had when we blew a beaver dam that had flooded a 40 acre farm field. Farmer called us and asked if we would blow a hole in a beaver dam on his property. He had been keeping it open with his D7 but got it stuck and the beavers patched the dam.
We didn't do the quick computation that would have told us there was over 30 million gallons of water on that field... :OMG Washed out a county road and flooded a few neighboring fields. We thought we were going to jail for that one. (We didn't have a permit for that one, stupid, stupid, stupid). Farmer that owned the land fixed the road and made nice with the neighbors.
