A bomb set to detonate when a light switch was energized!

Fortunately, an electrician found before it did it's dirty work

http://www.newser.com/story/204495/cops-house-for-sale-was-wired-to-explode.html

Sheeeesh, well i guess it's a good thing the electrician caught it, and didn't flip the lights on.

One less fire blamed on us too.....

~S~

Is there any more to the story yet?

When I move out, the first thing I do is call the PoCo to end my service. I suspect the power was already "off."

The second possibility is that the bomb simply didn't work, and the sparky found it when he began troubleshooting the light. Bombs are not nearly as easy to make as "The Anarchists' Cookbook" leads you to believe. I've seen countless 'never-fail' recipes fail to perform.

For that matter, electric work isn't as simple as it seems. Anyone want to guess that the connected wires were of the same potential?

As of March 27th, the police are still actively searching for the tenants.

Reno, there are some very detailed instructions in English to build an electrically triggered propane bomb, including pictures, online from ISIS.
The days of the Anarchist's Cookbook are long gone.

Got a link?

Look, the idea of landlords and tenants expressing malice towards each other are far from new. I recall one author who capitalized on this, by writing two books- one on how to 'tame' your landlord, and one on dealing with unwanted tenants.

I've also known folks who claimed to have done all manner of things in revenge- everything from removing the front door (to force a tenant out) to plastering fish inside the walls (to create odor).

Perhaps most distressing are the shelves of books at the local hardware store, purporting to replace a 5-year electrical apprenticeship with a $20 book, pretty pictures, and a few hours reading.

Then there's the matter of honest, ordinary wear and tear. I'm thinking here of the upscale New York building that actually blew up the other day. Gas leak? Unrepaired issues from a year ago? Non-permitted work, perhaps even unlicensed contractors? Fuggadaboudit.

Author Martin Cruz Smith, in the book "Red Square," described a wonderful bomb in great detail. Fans of Mythbusters will recall their attempts to re-create this bomb. It was a heck of a lot harder to accomplish, and far less effective, than the book led you to believe. That parallels my own experience, as well as actual law enforcement records: there are a lot more fizzles than real booms.

It came from an article on the Drudge Report with attached sublinks. I didn't bookmark it.
I saw it myself.

Let's try not let this thread wander too far off topic.

On topic, but not as shocking as the beginning point....

Our CCO inspector comes upon some interesting scenes. I do CCOs on occasion, and a few that were memorable.

Totally trashed interior, walls destroyed, plumbing fixtures busted or ripped out, basements with 2' of water/sewage.

One had at least a few months of household trash stacked up, and animal feces all over.

We call the POCO, gas co., and water co. to terminate services when we find these gems.

Needless to say, we have not found anything like the point of this thread.

The story also noted that cement had been poured down the drains.

The only sabotage job I'm personally aware of occurred about eighteen-years ago during a brand new grocery store construction -- underslab.

The concrete contractor was so angry at the stub ups from the plumbers and electricians that he took to pounding more than a few over with a baby sledge hammer. (!)

In vino veritas.

He lets his handiwork be known to other tradesmen -- and of course, the missing stubs are missing.

It costs him his shirt, his reputation, and ultimately his license... as he went bankrupt. The GC back-charged him something silly as the slab had to be jack-hammered something frightful to recover the turned over stubs. There were plenty -- most still showing the effects of his hammer blows.

Apparently, this was his first pour for a grocery store and he figured that the slab would look like a clean flat sheet of concrete... whereas any modern grocer is going to have stub ups simply everywhere: so many chillers and freezers.

And then throw in the floor sinks for the plumber.

No wonder he was the low bidder.

The astonishing thing is that anyone could possibly pull such a stunt and not realize that the (forensic) evidence would point straight back to themselves?

&&&&

BTW, another common sabotage against underslab pipes, concrete, can be defeated if caught early enough. Fresh concrete is quite vulnerable to acid -- even soda bottle acid -- as in Pepsi or Coke. (!) For this to work, you need to get right on it.

Concrete is extremely vulnerable to SUGAR. I don't know the chemistry, but even during WWII the French underground was encouraged to add sugar to German concrete fortifications -- the Atlantic Wall. It turns out that a tiny amount of sugar makes concrete stronger -- anything beyond tiny makes concrete weaker -- to the point of crumbling if hit by a hammer.

So when you douse newly poured concrete with soda pop -- any brand -- you're hitting it with both sugar and acid. The effect is not super rapid, but has been known to un-sabotage more than a few pipes.

So keep this in mind if any dribbles of concrete manage to get into your underslab runs. Quick action may save them.

It takes quite a bit of sugar to hurt concrete and I doubt the French resistance had that much sugar in a war ravaged Europe. The biggest problem for the Germans was salt, on the Atlantic wall. They had to wash the beach sand before they could use it.

Both of these cause the problem because they are water soluble and after the concrete cures, the salt or sugar washes away in the rain, leaving small voids throughout the matrix.

I doubt pouring a liter or two of soda pop in a concrete entombed drain will do much. My wife had this problem building houses, just from the tile guys washing out their grout tools in the sink and not chasing it with enough water. Usually they were chipping concrete and replacing pipe. You might have better luck with a gallon of muriatic acid, as long as all of the pipe is PVC. Just don't pour it in through the porcelain fixtures. Pull the crapper and pour it in the hole. It is heavier than water so it will go to the bottom.

The only time I've heard of sugar being used on fresh concrete was during the catastrophic London Underground pour last year. Forms were leaky or something and they flooded an entire signalling room with concrete! The engineers ended up buying any sugar they could find locally in order to keep the concrete from setting.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...sugar-used-to-slow-concrete-setting.html

Greg,

Due to domestic tariffs, Europe had quite a sugar beet 'empire.' The amount of sugar beets grown in Poland and Germany -- especially back then -- would surprise you.

[ The alternative was to import sugar from cane -- something that mercantilist politicians did not favor.

It's a strange, but true, fact: the Nazis obtained their poison gas as a byproduct of sugar beet refining (and does it ever stink, the refinery, that is)... and many other chemicals.]

I never read of the French underground being encouraged to use salt. I would think that salt would stop the concrete from even setting up properly in the first place -- resulting in prompt detection.

The soda pop cure only works on FRESH concrete -- much less than one day old -- so I've been told. From time to time, I've read of fellows pulling such cures off. I've never actually seen it done on any job myself.

Let's hope that concrete in PVC is a rare thing indeed.

In the case mentioned, the slab was jack hammered for days on end. The fouled up pour delayed the completion of the store by three full weeks. (!) The perp was thrown off the job and another outfit was brought in on a panic basis.

No grocery store for miles around ever had the troubles that particular build had. It cost the superintendent his career, multiple foremen lost their jobs or ended their careers,... Ages afterward, that stinko job was still the talk of the local trades. The word had really gotten around. Everyone involved lost their shirt.

Most of the blame properly belonged on the superintendent and the GC that put him in charge. He couldn't handle the pressure or the work flow.

From the Telegraph cited above:

"Sucrose, which is mainly found in cane and beet sugar available in supermarkets, is probably the most effective cement retardant. This is the sugar that most people will put in their cup of tea or their breakfast cereal.

Depending on the kind of cement being used, even small amounts of sugar can double the amount of time it takes to set.

Tests have shown that adding just 0.04% of cane sugar can cause a cement that normally takes 1 hour 18 minutes to set to increase to one two hours 36 minutes.

At concentrations of more than one per cent in a cement mix, sucrose can delay complete hardening almost indefinitely. "

As for the war: there are countless tales of sabotage successfully pulled off.

Tank restoration buffs that went entirely through salvaged German tanks have found that every single one of them had been sabotaged over and over -- in subtle ways -- usually in the lubrication system. No wonder wartime accounts constantly reported German tanks being tied up in the shops being repaired -- one more time. (!)

The slaves/ forced labor were unhappy in their work!

First time I heard of the sugar trick was when the teamsters union was on strike against a local cement plant. They would randomly figure out a way to toss a bag in a ready mix truck driven by management between the plant and the delivery point.

At least they only did it to trucks doing street paving jobs and not any doing structural building pours.

Major paving contractor had to rip up a few sections of pavement on a major road project and re-pour as the concrete did not meet the lab tests due to the sugar.

That is how I know about it. My mom worked for the Teamsters International in DC and I spent a lot of time with the boys talking about the "old days".
It must be something the Teamster organizers learn early in their career.

How about a tray of eggs left in an air duct?.....

Reminds me of an old joke Dan Ingram of Musicradio 77 WABC used to say to announce a record: "Love is in the air, or maybe it's just a dead rat in the air conditioning ducts..."

Talk about walking down memory lane......

"Reminds me of an old joke Dan Ingram of Musicradio 77 WABC"