The Massachusetts State Police bomb squad detonated hazardous materials – including ammunition-making supplies – discovered in a vacant home for sale on Summer Street Thursday evening.
Bomb technicians wearing protective gear safely removed the items from the basement of the century-old home at 132 Summer St. Thursday and took them to sandpits behind the town’s sewage treatment plant in Camelot Industrial Park.
They were then detonated “in amounts that were small enough not to cause an additional hazard to personnel or the surrounding area,” according to Jake Wark, spokesperson for the state Department of Fire Services.
Plymouth police, firefighters, and emergency medical services personnel were on hand when the bomb squad arrived with the potentially dangerous items, Wark said.
A real estate agent doing a walkthrough of the house had alerted police. They found the basement “extremely cluttered” with ammunition, smokeless powder, primers, and other equipment used to make ammunition, he said.
The items had deteriorated, making them especially “unstable and hazardous,” Wark said.
Some of the material had been stored so long and so poorly that even the act of unscrewing or forcing open the containers could detonate their contents, injuring people and destroying property, he said. “Safety dictated that they be countercharged — that is, detonated under controlled conditions,” Wark said.
In a written statement, Plymouth town communications coordinator Casey Kennedy said: “There was no danger to the public and this is considered an isolated, non-criminal incident.”
Police said that residents were alerted with a reverse 911 call that the explosions were coming. Chief Dana Flynn said the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Dept., which serves as dispatcher for the Plymouth police and fire departments, sent out those calls.
The messages went out only to those enrolled in the CodeRed alert program, which notifies residents when there’s an emergency. Kennedy said any resident with a landline is automatically signed up for CodeRed. Those without a landline can enroll to have such calls sent to their cellphone or email, she added.
More than 25,000 landlines are connected to the alert system, Kennedy said, along with 1,244 cellphones, and just over 1,500 email addresses.
But several people who did not receive a warning said they were startled by the sustained and loud blasts.
“The noise, the shaking, the rattling of all our windows was louder, more intense than any earthquake I’ve been in in 46 years living in San Francisco,” one person wrote in an email to the Independent.
“Families with infants and children were traumatized by the event,” the person wrote. “Also, was it absolutely necessary to have the one massive and violent detonation that shook houses?”
Andrea Estes can be reached at andrea@plymouthindependent.org.