By Trevor Phipps
Last Wednesday night, residents were shocked when the Teller County Sheriff’s Office issued a reverse 911 call warning people to avoid the area of Upper Twin Rock Rd. and Quartz Rd. just before 9 p.m. The sheriff’s office closed the road in the area due to agents and deputies being “on scene disposing of an unexploded ordinance.”
According to Lieutenant Wes Walter, a family was going through items of a deceased family member when they found several dangerous explosive devices. “I didn’t want to release who it was and I didn’t want to release the address,” Walter said. “The guy is deceased and the family is grieving, so I’m not going to do that to them.”
The Teller County Sheriff’s office received a call at around 8:30 p.m. that night and they were requested to assist the Colorado Springs Metro Explosives Unit and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents. The bomb squad then decided that some of the explosive devices needed emergency destruction due to them being unsafe.
The deputies secured the seen and asked local residents to shelter in place and stay away from their windows. Technicians from the explosive unit then safely disposed all of the explosives in an operation that lasted until about 3 a.m. the next morning.
According to Walter, the technicians had to detonate several of the devices on the property. “They detonated the copper caps with a pound and a half of explosives,” Walter said. “So ,there were small detonations not big. Because the copper caps go back to the 1800s and they are either pulmonate or nitro so they sweat and they are really hazardous. So, they had to be destroyed on site. They had other things that they had to destroy, but all of them were very small explosions except the last one that probably woke some people up because it was a pound and a half.”
Walter said that the explosive unit followed a specific process to explode the items on the property.
“They find a way to contain the blast the best they can so it goes straight up and not out,” Walter explained. “They had the copper caps all laid out and they put plastic explosives on top to make sure it destroys it all. They make sure they have complete control over it, they yelled ‘fire in the hole’ three times, and then they hit the actuator to get a ‘boom.’ They wait awhile and then they go back down and check and make sure they destroyed everything.”
Walter also said that there were no evacuations because there were no major explosions. The deputies blocked off the road, just so nobody could drive onto the property. The road was reopened after the operation was completed at around 3 a.m.