ExplosivesCompany illegally stores 6 million pounds of explosives, neighboring town evacuated

The 800 residents of the town of Doyline, located about 270 miles northwest of New Orleans, were hastily evacuated Friday, and may be forced to stay away until today (Tuesday), after the authorities found more the six million pounds of explosives illegally stored on the grounds of Camp Minden, which used to house the Louisiana Army Ammunitions Plant.

Col. Mike Edmonson, state police superintendent said that boxes and small barrels of the M6 artillery propellant were found both outdoors and crammed into unauthorized buildings.

Fox News reports that boxes of propellant pellets were piled and packed in unauthorized buildings at Explo Systems Inc., and some were spilling. Edmonson said that the company’s “careless and reckless disregard made it unsafe for their own employees, for schoolchildren in Doyline, for the town of Doyline.”

Explo is located on a portion of the closed ammunition plant’s 15,000 acres, which is leased for commercial use.

Capt. Doug Cain, a state police spokesman, identified the product as M6 propellant, used in howitzers and other artillery. Yahoo reports that the pellets are compressed nitrocellulose, also known as guncotton.

Police had estimated the total at one million tons after an investigator looking into a 15 October explosion at Explo Systems saw cardboard boxes on long rows of pallets behind a building.

When crews returned to the site on Saturday to begin and remove the boxes to bunkers located two miles away on the site, they noticed more boxes stored in sheds and warehouses.

“It wasn’t in their storage magazines. They had it hidden on the property, away from the storage magazines where we would expect to find it,” Cain said.

Edmonson said, “It was stuffed in corners. It was stacked all over.”

He told Fox News that in two days, crews have moved just under a million pounds from the tightest-packed buildings into approved containers and onto twenty-seven tractor-trailers to move to storage bunkers. Another 250,000 pounds has been moved a safe distance from the bulk of the material.

Edmonson said that there is no need to remove every last pound of explosives into bunkers before the residents of the city could go back to their homes. The important thing is to divide the propellant into amounts which would not threaten the town if some ignites, with each area a safe distance from the others.