I love the list of half considered excuses considered before landing on dynamite. They just wanted to use dynamite.
I'm not gonna say it would have been routine at a small county highway department but in some lines of work it absolutely would have been. It wasn't cheap but it was cheap enough that a typical rural land owner would rather just dynamite stumps or boulders rather than tackle them with any machine small enough that you'd have to dig out around it rather than rip it from the earth in one go.
You don't realize how much you miss it until you start out pricing the options for clearing rocky forest.
Clearing forested rocky soil is right up there in the ‘worst case’ scenario, time and wear and tear wise. It might take 80+ hours in some cases to clear a couple acres. That is very expensive.
With dynamite, it might take a quarter of that. Equipment requirements are usually much less - a big drill, and whatever needed to transport the dynamite and caps to the site, pretty much. And dynamite (if you aren’t dealing with all the paperwork), isn’t particularly expensive either.
As long as you don’t need to worry about fly rock, shrapnel, complaining neighbors, etc.
https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/weather-underground...
It's not uncommon to break up large cadavers so they can be eaten by scavenger animals before the rot causes olfactory issues or poses actual health risk.
In Austria for example, cattle which died on the alpine pastures (about 20 a year) was usually blown up to allow scavenger animals to quickly dispose of the remains as that was way cheaper than hauling the carcasses off with helicopters [1], but after some outrage in 2001, eventually the government decided in 2004 that the practice would now be banned, in exchange the government took over the helicopter transport bills.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprengung_verendeter_Rinder
>If a cow or similar cattle ship outside the slaughterhouse by lightning, fall, illness or for similar reasons, it is up to the owner, i.e. usually the farmer, to ensure the transport and disposal of the animal body in Austria to ensure the protection of water bodies and an intact landscape.[ 1] In the Vorarlberg Alps, about 20 such deaths occur each year. If the carcass is located on an alpine pasture or at anywhere else that cannot be reached by truck, only a transport by helicopter is possible. It cost 15,000 Austrian shillings in 2001. This corresponds approx. adjusted for inflation by 2025. 1,500 euros.[ 2]
>Although at least in Vorarlberg 80 percent of these transport costs were covered by the federal state, the farmer was only approx. It was customary to pay for the helicopter 3,000 shillings there instead to eliminate the animals by blasting it on the spot. This beat in 2001 only with 500 shillings.[ 2] Thus, the farmer was able to approx. 2,500 shillings (approx. 250 Euro) save. The explosion ripped the animal into smaller pieces, which should then be removed more quickly or eliminated by eaters such as birds and vows. The explosion was either by explosives, which in turn meant increased costs or by the farmers themselves.
(It was interesting to see the term for this event is "Walexplosion" in German -- I cannot speak the language but I did enough Duolingo, paired with a trip to DE and Austria that I can jump between machine translation and a dictionary and understand things in the written form)
Edit: The grammar of German seems to get translated quite literally, heh.
Here's the relevant section via DeepL:
In Austria, if a cow or similar livestock dies outside the slaughterhouse due to lightning, a fall, illness or for similar reasons, it is the responsibility of the owner, i.e. usually the farmer, to ensure that the carcass is removed and disposed of in order to protect waterways and maintain an intact landscape.[1] In the Vorarlberg Alps, there are around 20 such deaths per year. If the carcass is located on a mountain pasture or in another place that cannot be reached by truck, it can only be removed by helicopter. This cost 15,000 Austrian schillings in 2001. Adjusted for inflation, this corresponds to approx. 1,500 euros in 2025.[2]
Although at least in Vorarlberg 80 percent of these transportation costs were covered by the federal state, meaning that the farmer only had to pay approx. 3,000 shillings for the helicopter, it was common practice there to remove the animals by blasting on site instead. This only cost 500 shillings in 2001[2], so the farmer was able to save around 2,500 shillings (approx. 250 euros) by blowing up the animal. The explosion tore the animal into smaller pieces, which would then decompose more quickly or be disposed of by scavengers such as birds and foxes. The explosion was either caused by demolition experts, which in turn meant higher costs, or by the farmers themselves.
I wish there was an easier way to toggle the translation on/off, if one's goal is to read the news in another language it's a bit hard to do so.
Both :-)