Explosives in a locker in the Port; Update; His explanation
August 20th, 2008 by Republican By DefaultI’m reading this story in a blog on the TNT site and wondering if there’s more to the story. My conclusion. Obviously there is. I just don’t know yet what the rest of the story might be. But, I decided to have some fun with some speculation. After the details are released I’ll be able to see how far off I was in my guessing.
The weirdest part is that an employee locker is usually relatively small. Making homegrown explosives with the amount of chemicals that would fit in an employee locker probably doesn’t yield enough explosives to sink anything bigger than a ski-boat. Granted I’m no expert on explosives, but simple physics would dictate that the amount of energy stored in and subsequently released from a given volume of matter would be limited, mostly, by the volume.
My first thought is that the guy is just dumb. Maybe he was thinking about making a statement or maybe he was thinking about having fun on Independence Day and forgot to take the chemicals home with him… for a month and a half. I’ll stick with dumb for now, but I think the fireworks idea is a stretch.
Then I had to wonder about a personal vendetta. An ex-girlfriend’s car? An ex-wife’s lawyer’s car? An ex-wife? Who knows? Then there’s the disgruntled employee possibility. I guess this could be the chemical plant version of going postal.
My next thought was domestic terrorism. This could be garden variety stuff like anti-war protestor, union thuggery or eco-terrorism. Since the union and the port have recently reached an agreement I guess this could have been ‘Plan B’. The USNS Brittin that was protested recently was about a mile away, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been staging something from his locker at work. Ok, with that I’m still sticking with ‘dumb’. Eco-terrorism? I doubt it. Making explosives would require actual thought, something eco-terrorists are seemingly incapable of doing.
The plant is basically a lime processing plant. So unless his goal was to make the already polluted waters in the Port a little more alkaline, I doubt that his target was the plant he worked at. Unless he’s just a disgruntled employee.
Another possibility is international terrorism. There’s a U.S. Navy pier right across the street from the plant this guy works in. I don’t know what the Navy does at that facility, but it’s there. Here’s a link to a map of the area if you’d like to speculate with me: Port of Tacoma Area Map. (I’m not giving away any government secrets, I got the link from the Port’s Web site.)
So, without further information I’m left to speculate. At this point I’m going to go with ‘dumb’ and either ‘disgruntled employee’ or ‘nutcase’. Time will tell. I’m not going to investigate on my own. I’m just going to watch the media which, by the way, didn’t seem to pick this up even though he was booked into jail at 3 p.m.
Update: According to the TNT the ‘chemicals’ were fertilizer and lighter fluid. Other employees had already moved the ‘explosives’ to the parking lot before authorities arrived. No word on what he planned to do with the chemicals. My guess, clean a dirty planter and grow some begonias.
Now that we know what the chemicals actually are I can understand why no one was really alarmed. That amount of fertilizer and ligher fluid could certainly hurt or kill someone, but the widespread damage we’d expect from a terrorist attack would require a lot more than what would fit in ‘a small bag’ of fertilizer. So if he is a terrorist, he’s a dumb one.
Update: Ok. Here’s his explanation. I’ll let you be the judge of my speculation.