Continuing on the journal entry catch-up.

This week has been spent attending an FBI school on post-blast investigations, i.e. what to do after the bomb goes off and how to figure out who done blowed it up. The first couple of days were a bit boring (death by powerpoint) with basic instruction in bomb-making materials, construction, and aftermath, though it got a lot more interesting yesterday when one of the instructors shared all of the unclassified information he could share concerning his time in Iraq doing post-blast investigations. (Needless to say, he was kept very very busy doing post-blast in Iraq.)

Today was super-cool though. Today was the practical demonstrations of explosives. Boom! Kapow! We went out to the local National Guard base and got to see all sorts of different types of explosives set off. Amazing thing was how much you felt the blast and heat with even small amounts of explosives. One of the demonstrations was with a quarter pound of C-4. We were about 500 feet away, and it still smacked us in the face when it cranked off.

They then set off four buried pipe bombs, then broke us into four groups and showed us how to search for all of the materials and pieces, and how to reconstruct exactly what the bomb had been made of and how it was detonated.

Tomorrow we get to go down to an abandoned building in New Orleans, where bombs will be set off in rooms inside the building. We'll then have all day to sift through the scenes and try and determine what happened and who did it.

The bomb and explosive stuff was really pretty cool and interesting, and I'd really like to learn more about it, except that I have ZERO desire to be part of a bomb squad. NONE. I'm willing to go in afterwards and do the evaluation, but I really want no part of actually working with explosives.

I'll stick with my nice safe computers, thank you very much.