Aberdeen blasts can be heard from Perry Hall into Delaware

Baltimore Sun

A series of explosions at the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground today rattled dishes and startled residents from Perry Hall to Middletown, Del., 30 miles away.

“The entire house shook,” said Joseph MulQueen, who called The Sun from his home in Perry Hall to report what he thought was an earthquake.

A check of area seismographs revealed no tremors. But officials at Aberdeen acknowledged that a series of afternoon blasts in the facility’s Edgewood area did trigger about 30 phone calls.

The explosions were “static detonations,” not shots from big guns, said George Mercer, APG’s chief of public affairs. “And they were loud. Anybody who took notice, who was disturbed or upset, had reason to be.”

MulQueen was astonished to learn the source of the shaking he felt from 10 miles away. “Wow! That is amazing. … That’s not an M-80 [firecracker].”

The loudest of the three shots registered 129.3 decibels on one of the 18 noise monitors deployed around the base. The Army’s noise limit at those monitors is 130 decibels.

The impact of the big blasts was probably amplified by an atmospheric inversion over the region , Mercer said. That occurs when a layer of warm air lies on top of a surface layer of colder air. It tends to cause noise from APG tests to bounce back toward the ground rather than dissipate upward into the sky.

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Gun tests were being conducted earlier in the day, too. But the three loudest blasts were static detonations set off at 3:15 p.m., 3:45 p.m. and 4 p.m., Mercer said.

“That’s when I started getting phone calls. … About 10 of those calls were people saying, “What happened? What’s going on? They were not complaints.”

“I heard from one woman in Perry Hall. She said she’d been there for some time and never heard us at all. Today, she said, ‘The place was shaking. Holy mackerel!’”

The other 20 calls were complaints, he said, “Either, ‘You scared me to death,’ or ‘You shook my house,’ or ‘It’s inappropriate to be doing this in the middle of a residential area.’”

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Mercer said he could not reveal the nature of the tests, for security reasons.

“But when you’re shooting things off and blowing things up, you’re going to create noise,” he said. “Today, the people making the decision to do it felt they really had to do it now. It was not something they could put off till later in the day, or later in the year. … And we believe what we’re doing is important.”

Mercer said testing will continue at APG, but he was unable to say whether any tests the size of today’s blasts are planned. “It could happen,” he said.