What started as a 911 call at 2:15 p.m. Oct. 10 quickly turned into a dramatic standoff between Knoxville Police Department bomb technicians and a 5-foot-by-5-foot steel box filled with explosives .
KPD bomb squad commander Lt. Jonathan Chadwell and his team immediately stepped in at CMC Recycling and worked over an exhausting 36 hours in concert with local, state and federal agencies .
A KPD technician was already en route to investigate when Chadwell first learned what they were dealing with: an estimated 206 sticks of dynamite.
And the box was smoking.
It got worse. A drone showed there were not only explosives in the box but multiple blasting caps right alongside, some containing up to 15 feet of tangled wire. Those items are never supposed to be stored together.
“So we were able to see what was inside the box, we were able to see possible explosives and could tell for sure that there were blasting caps. The door was smoking. It was a little bit on fire, and then it started catching more on fire because it was 2-inch oak wood outside of the door,” Chadwell told Knox News.