In mid-July, a Haines resident found a funny-looking object near the Klehini Flats in the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve. The man suspected it was a type of explosive called a detonating cord – and Haines Police Chief Jimmy Yoakum says he was right.
“It is used to ignite bigger explosives, from my understanding,” Yoakum said. “You know, road work, crews, mining operations — it’s used in a number of different things.”
Yoakum said the man brought the cord home and called the police. The Haines Police Department doesn’t have in-house bomb expertise, so Yoakum called in bomb technicians from the Juneau Police Department and FBI in Anchorage.
Last week, authorities transported the det cord to a gravel pit along the Haines Highway and defused it.
The explosive was commercial grade and is typically used to ignite larger explosives. Yoakum said that means it likely came from a commercial operation in the upper Chilkat Valley, like construction or mining exploration.
“We’ve got a lot of commercial industry going on in the valley, and so you know it could have come from any one of those,” Yoakum said, noting that commercial use of detonating cord is “completely legal.”
He said the authorities have no reason to think there are any “homemade bomb makers running around the borough” and that the local police department isn’t currently investigating the matter. Asked if the explosive could have been detonated by a passerby, he said he believed “it would have taken some other element that normal people don’t have for it to have gone off.”
Still, he said that if anyone else sees something that could be an explosive, they should leave it alone and report it immediately.
A facebook post by Alaska State Parks on Friday noted that the situation followed several recent unexplained explosions in the area. Yoakum said he believes those incidents involved shooting practice in the nearby gravel pit, potentially with an explosive called Tannerite.
But ultimately, he said the incidents have all been separate, and that “nobody was ever at risk.”
