Bomb Squad Detonates Explosive in Seaside Parking Lot

At about 8:45pm Friday a small group of onlookers gathered along a Fremont Avenue sidewalk in Seaside to watch the scene unfolding across the street. Police had cordoned off the entire parking lot of Laguna Plaza, a shopping center near the intersection of Kimball and Fremont, and just minutes earlier someone in a heavy green protective suit had poured buckets of liquid onto the concrete in front of the plaza's Carl’s Jr.

Traffic for three blocks—from Hilby to Kimball Avenues—was being redirected by police. A bomb squad robot was conspicuously parked next to a Monterey County Sheriff’s Office van.

For a few minutes nothing happened. Then a man in a green uniform put his hands to his mouth and screamed, “Fire in the hole!”

He twisted 90 degrees and repeated the call in every direction. Some onlookers took a few steps backwards, unsure of what was happening.

BOOM! An explosion rocked the tiny shopping center and a string of black smoke emerged from the concrete.

“Shit,” said girl with a lip ring, who was taking a video with her cell phone. “That scared the shit out of me.”

She added, “I’m just like ‘fire in the hole? Wait what?’”

Minutes later the excitement was over. The onlookers went home. Fremont traffic was back in full force, and two television cameramen hauled their equipment across the four-lane street for an interview.

Jesse Grant, deputy sheriff and bomb technician with the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, said somebody called Seaside Police around 5pm to report finding blasting caps in the plaza parking lot. Seaside Police, in turn, alerted the county bomb squad, which confirmed the discovery.

Blasting caps are small, sensitive metallic tubes that are used to ignite larger devices, like dynamite, Grant said. The caps that were found were still in their packaging and appeared to be very old. The package was small—about the size of two tuna cans stuck together—but dangerous, he said.

“These are not things you want to play around with,” he said. The devices were commonly available decades ago and used in agriculture work, but have since been regulated.

The bomb squad, after taking an X-ray of the package, used one of their own explosives to blow up the caps.

Grant said it looked like somebody found the caps, realized what they were, and just left them in the parking lot. Seaside police will be conducting further investigation, he said.

“We’re just lucky a child didn’t pick it up and throw it,” he said.

It isn’t illegal to have blasting caps, but Grant said people who find them and want to dispose of them correctly should alert police.