Blasted garage sale!
By Trish Moore
Innocent purchase
clears Lihue area
Star-BulletinLIHUE -- A man delivering several sticks of dynamite to police headquarters yesterday prompted an evacuation of the nearby elementary school, courthouse, state and county buildings and several businesses.
A team of military ordnance experts from Schofield Barracks arrived on Kauai about 3 p.m. to remove the dynamite and explode it safely in a sugar cane field.
Police Chief George Freitas said a Kalaheo man apparently unwittingly had bought the dynamite at a garage sale over the weekend and turned it over to police at about 10:30 a.m.
The man bought a wooden box at the sale, and neither he nor the people he bought it from realized there were five old, crusty sticks of dynamite inside, Freitas said.
The dynamite was in the back of the man's truck and was "sweating," and bits of crystalline nitrogen had seeped out. Complicating the situation was a large container of diesel fuel in the back of the truck, Freitas said.
"The chances of it going off are pretty slim, but we couldn't take the chance," he said.
Wilcox Elementary students were evacuated to the Kauai War Memorial Convention Hall, where they remained the rest of day.
Sixth-grader Erin Fabio, 11, said: "When the teachers told us about it, the boys started running around, and some of us were staying calm and wondering what we were doing."
Lihue Plantation plowed a road and dug a large trench in its cane field near Hanamaulu, where the dynamite was exploded.
