Blasting Through College: My Summer at the Dynamite Plant

In the mid-’80s, while most of my college friends were flipping burgers or bailing hay, I spent my summers at the IRECO explosives plant in Carthage, Missouri. My title was “assistant to the facility engineer,” but in practice, it meant I was part draftsman, part surveyor, part construction supervisor — and sometimes an unwilling witness to absurdly dangerous behavior.

The plant was officially IRECO, but locals still called it Hercules, its original name. Just down the road was Atlas, another explosives manufacturer where my dad, my uncle, and my cousin all worked. My dad was in the “ammonia unit,” making nitrogen fertilizer. My uncle and cousin were on the “powder line,” turning out dynamite. Both plants had once been part of the Du Pont Powder Company until the government broke them up in 1912 for being too much of a monopoly.

The engineering office, where I spent most of my time, sat in the basement of the main office — considered the safest spot in the whole facility. Along one wall, time-lapse video recorders captured feeds from cameras in every building, ready to provide evidence in case of an explosion. You could flip through the live views on a bank of monitors. Sometimes the facility manager would wander in just to see what was going on.

One afternoon, the director came down, casually scanning the feeds — until he froze, blurted “Sweet Jesus!” and bolted upstairs. Minutes later, a small parade of bosses returned, rewound a tape, and pressed play. There, on grainy footage, was a worker in a dynamite packing house juggling sticks of dynamite between loading them into boxes. He was fired before the day was out.

The facility engineer — a recent transplant from Mississippi — had hired me to help design and build new packing facilities for nitroglycerin-based dynamite. Everything in these buildings was engineered for safety: non-sparking brass, wood, and nylon machines powered by compressed air; anti-static flooring; and lights mounted outside, shining through windows to avoid introducing electrical sparks inside.

One building was carved into a limestone bluff along the river. I designed the thick concrete retaining wall that wrapped around it. We blasted out the space ourselves, using 5,000 pounds of dynamite — our own product. The shockwave when we fired that off was something, especially since we weren’t that far away.

This was the pre-CAD era, so every plan was drawn by hand with ink on mylar. I spent hours hunched over drafting tables, or outside with a survey crew, or walking muddy job sites to check contractors’ work. When school started, I stayed on part-time, updating as-built drawings after hours.

The following summer, I worked on compressor houses for the air systems that powered the plant’s machinery. Each dynamite-packing building was served by a narrow-gauge railway, and I helped design the track right-of-way.

By fall, I’d transferred to another college to continue my geology degree and never returned to IRECO.

Nearly forty years later, in early 2024, I stopped for gas in Carthage on my way to Phoenix. The man across from me wore a Dyno Nobel hat — the successor to IRECO — so I struck up a conversation. He’d worked there for over three decades before retiring. To my surprise, he remembered me! And as we talked, I learned his son, also a plant employee, had married one of my cousins.

Small world. Explosively small, in my case.