ATF Bomb School: There's No Dropping This Class

HOMESTEAD, FL — With more than a dozen yellow leads running to a hodge·podge of carefully placed explosives downfield, this was no ordinary class at Homestead Air Reserve Base earlier this week. Classroom supplies include a block of C4 plastic explosive, professional pyrotechnic-grade fireworks, ammonium nitrate mixed with aluminum powder, smokeless black powder and even common firworks that can be purchased in many grocery stores.

"Fire in the hole. Fire in the hole. Fire in the hole," exclaimed a volunteer from the gaggle of first responders who attended the class from Miami-Dade and Broward Counties in South Florida. They gathered around a pop up tent to witness the spectacle of 15 different explosions, including one that sent a flaming tire 100 feet in the air and another that instructors fondly referred to as the "wall of fire."

Subscribe to Miami Patch's free email news alerts and newsletters. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app; download the free Patch Android app here.)

By the end of the week-long course, first responders will return to their agencies armed with new knowledge to fight the ever present threat posed by terror attacks and other dangerous incidents that involve explosives.

The students included first responders from Miami-Dade Fire Rescue, City of Miami Fire Rescue and the Broward Sheriff's Office among other agencies.

No sooner than the instructor from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Miami Field Office had begun his introduction to the day's events, he was quickly interrupted by a thunderous boom.

"That's the wake up shot guys," he confided with a mischievous grin. But "from now on, we're going to call out 3-2-1."

Organizers from ATF and the Florida Bureau of Fire, Arson and Explosives Investigations, hope that attendees will be able to recognize various types of explosive devices on the streets of their South Florida communities.

"Throughout the course of the week, they'll detonate a type of bomb and the students will go and collect the evidence," explained ATF Special Agent Clara S. Himel.

She said that every device is different, which helps investigatators if they know what to look for.

"Some of them you feel a shockwave. Some of them you won't. Some of them you'll see how it makes a big boom for lack of a better word," Himel told Patch.

Ever since the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, there has been a growing emphasis in law enforcement on the threat posed by homemade explosive devices, such as the pressure cooker bombs detonated by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Those bombs killed three people but injured hundreds more in the Boston attack.

The Miami area students will also come away with a better appreciation for the dangers associated with each type of explosive device.

And "how readily available they are now," added Patrick Roush, one of the ATF instructors.

Watch as the flaming tire soars 100 feet into the air and then comes falling back down below:

Roush said that the general public can't legally buy fireworks used by professional pyrotechnic experts, but some find their way to the streets anyway.

"That's where we can kind of come in to try to mitigate some of that so they don't end up in the hands of kids," Roush explained. "But it does happen."

Not far from the blasting demonstration, ATF K-9 handler Zane Dodds was giving a demonstration with his 24/7 companion, Babs — an 18-month-old yellow lab — who loves her job, but particularly the treats.

"She spent 13 weeks at our academy learning to equate food with explosive odors," Dodds told Patch. "What we use a lot of times are shell casings. She finds firearms that have been fired before, explosives. Basically, with all the different formulations, there's six different explosive families. She can find all of them — anywhere from commercial explosives to homemade explosives."

Babs, who can barely contain her enthusiasm for the job, benefits from a naturally keen sense of smell.

"We walk into a room and smell chocolate chip cookies," observed Dodds. "She smells the flour, the sugar, the chocolate chips themselves, and then what's inside those chocolate chips."

That's because dogs are built differently from humans.

"Inside of her nose, she has little ripples that trap all of that odor. If you were to stretch it out it would be twice as long as she is," Dodds explained.

Watch K-9 Babs as she searches for a shotgun shell below:

In the case of the Boston bombing, Special Agent Himel said that investigators were able to determine that the bombs were fashioned from pressure cookers just by the fragments left behind.

"They picked up pieces of a pressure cooker," she said of investigators. "They put everything together and they said 'this is what it was.'"

Photo gallery by Paul Scicchitano