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Back when I was a kid, early 1970's I believe, my uncle had a large field he leased to a farmer neighbor to grow cotton. His name was Ivan, I'll never forget. Problem was that on one end of the field, the beavers would dam up a stream and take almost an acre of the field with water. After getting his BIG John Deere stuck twice, he decided to do something. Went to the hardware store and bought a bunch of dynamite (TNT or whatever it was - you could do that back then) to blow up some dams and reclaim his field.
Anyway, apparently he had never used explosives before. Of course, myself and my cousin HAD to go watch this as stuff was gonna get "blowed up"! I remember he put about 8 sticks together in a plastic bag, put a blasting cap & fuse in the center stick, and trodded off into the new swamp to place the explosives. In a few minutes, he came trotting out again. We were prolly 100 yds or so away, behind the pickup. After a minute or so, it went off. I remember the shock wave almost knocking us over, and a tree stump the size of a car 100 feet in the air! Then we realized that the air was full of sticks, clumps of mud, etc., and all that stuff was about to rain down on us! We ran up into the woods as mud, sticks, fish, etc, literllay rained everywhere. A log the size of my leg landed on the windshield of his truck cracking the glass! And it left a huge crater where the dam was. As we were standing there in the aftermath, my 10 y/o cousin looked up and said "Damn Ivan! I believe you used too much!" Real funny at the time, but it scares me as I look back at it. After that, he found that 1 stick was sufficient to remove a dam.
Tommy D.
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