"Boomsday" is Every Day for Some Knoxvillians

May 15, 2008
By: Elisha Sauers

For years, unbeknownst to thousands of moviegoers, “Thriller Night” at the old drive-in movie theater in Palmyra, N.J., was just a tire-tread away from a catastrophe more horrifying than anything ever projected on the big screen.

Just below the former drive-in’s surface are highly explosive projectiles — some even splintering out of the ground — that could knock out an entire city block if accidentally triggered.

They’re leftover relics from a World War II-era bomb-testing site, and with the aid and expertise of the Munitions Management Group of Knoxville, one of only 30-some privately owned companies in the country that specializes in sweeping arsenal-contaminated properties, developers will soon be re-purposing the 185-acre “dirty site” as a  new subdivision.

The private demand for bomb specialists is higher than one might think. Currently, MMG crews are working in New Jersey and Florida for developers with plans for new neighborhoods that found military ordnances buried in the land where they intended to break ground.

Jim Crawford, a self-described family man who has worked with MMG for a year, is the current site manager in Palmyra. Though he spends months away from his wife and three kids, he flies back to Knoxville every chance he gets, he says. He looks forward to trips home for “R and R” from the everyday stress of his job.

“The danger is always in the back of your mind, but you get over it,” says Crawford, whose crew has thus far identified and retrieved more than 200 ordnances in Palmyra since beginning their contract in January. “We have a safety officer who does site safety oversight. It’s good that he’s there because it’s like when you’re hanging up a picture: How many nails are you going to hammer into a wall before you get careless and hit  your finger?”

Despite the perceived danger of finding and safely disposing of munitions, Don Jenkins, MMG co-owner, says the number of casualties in the industry is low. In the private sector, Jenkins recalls only two on-the-job fatalities in the past century.

When Crawford and his crew of 20 men and women head to work for the day, they’re dressed in T-shirts, blue jeans, steel-toed boots, cowboy hats and University of Tennessee ball caps.

“No amount of protective gear will do us any good,” says Crawford. “One wrong move and you turn into a pink vapor.”

Jenkins readily acknowledges his being an adrenaline junkie played a major role in the founding of the company. While serving in infantry during Desert Storm, Jenkins learned the skills for handling and detonating munitions. When he returned home from the operation, he applied his training to another private munitions management company based in Texas before finally deciding to start his own.

His business is thriving solely on word-of-mouth. According to 411 operators, the World Wide Web and the Yellow Pages, no such company exists. Most of Jenkins’ clients learn about him through the company’s networking with hordes of environ- mental attorneys.

Having grown up in East Tennessee, he and his wife moved back to Knoxville where he now oversees MMG.

Most of the company’s employees have military backgrounds like himself. “I wanted to do something that would kind of keep me excited all the time,” says Jenkins. “Just seeing the bombs go off and feeling the boom — it’s invigorating.”

In Palmyra, the “booms” are going off once every week. As Crawford’s team accumulates ordnances, the crew buries the found objects in a hole two- or three-feet deep, piles more than a ton of sandbags atop the cache and routinely detonates an explosion between 2:30 and 3 p.m. to demolish the projectiles. It’s something the not-too-distant residents are getting accustomed to hearing on a weekday afternoon.

“You hear some bang. It’s pretty loud,” says Crawford. “You can feel it on the ground sometimes. And those sandbags can be tossed some-30 or 40 feet up into the air.”

These particular ordnances are remnants of tests Frankfort Arsenal conducted in the early 20th century — some involving mustard gas — but occasionally, Crawford has come across even older antiquities. Earlier this month, MMG workers found a Civil War-era ordnance left from Frankfort Arsenal Union artillery. It was a three-pound, torpedo-shaped hunk of lead.

Many of the site workers are drawn to the job with a romanticized sense of adventure, Crawford says. Though blowing up live munitions may be something to brag about at the local watering hole, the work can be repetitive, cumbersome and tedious. Each man or woman on the site can be seen ambling the property for hours on end, with a metal detector in one hand and a shovel in the other.

Crawford, whose experience lies in construction management, says there are possibly enough sites like these to keep MMG in business for a long time.

“My grandkids could be doing this  stuff,” he says.

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