Oops!

Inki and I are birdsitting her mother Ingvild's bird Caspar while Ingvild is on vacation in Denmark, so we walked over there last night (it's about a mile) and around 9pm we heard what I took for a loud thunderclap. Turns out it was a planned dynamiting of some rock for a construction project in the area. This doesn't really come as a surprise. Western Norway is very mountainous, and between the mountains and fjords and other obstacles it was hard until the last century to get around. (This is one reason why dialects are very distinctive here; people kept close to home.) Tunnels and bridges have made a huge difference in recent years. Tunnels are everywhere here. You can either go around the mountain to Fyllingsdalen, for instance, or you can go through it and save lots of time. On the way to Hamar last February we went through dozens of tunnels, including the longest, a 17 km gargantuan tunnel with internal lighting that changes color every 5 km or so to try to help keep drivers awake. Everything here is made of granite, and if you look at the rock walls around you can see the drill holes used to put the dynamite in place almost everywhere.

So people are used to explosions here. There was the siren before the explosion, but Inki was surprised not to hear the all-clear afterwards. Reading this morning's paper we found out why.

The plan was to use 1500-1700 kg of dynamite to clear out 3500 cubic meters of granite about a mile from our house. Apparently, though, some of the rock was loose already, and the result was to throw chunks of rock up to the size of small boulders 200 meters or so through the air. A car dealership within that radius had 25-30 cars damaged or destroyed.

Here's a picture of one such formerly new car, now reduced to scrap. Photo credit: www.bt.no.



They were really lucky nobody got hurt ('cause let's face it, in this case hurt = dead) though I doubt the demolition contractors will be making any money on this job after paying the price of a new car lot. Homeowners in the area complained that the explosion shook their houses more than is usual for demolition work as well, and the contractor would be responsible for any structural damage to the houses resulting from his miscalculation.

One of the local tabloids filled its cover with a picture of one of these cars and the headline "Oops!"

Oops indeed.