They Built an Island to Hide Dynamite - Then It Blew Up Civilization

They Built an Island to Hide Dynamite - Then It Blew Up Civilization

Heat, timber, and twenty short tons of nitroglycerin sat in rickety shanties on a deliberately built island in the Detroit River - and when it detonated in 1906 the shock was felt 85 miles away. How did two men with revolvers standing at the water’s edge become the central mystery of a blast that left a 60-foot crater and no fully satisfying explanation?

In this episode, we tell the sequence of events that led a banned explosives company to build an island, the industrial pressures that kept operations running after earlier disasters, and the unanswered questions about what triggered the 1906 explosion that reverberated as far as Cleveland.

Person: Rogers Person: Perry Date: 1906 (summer) Event: Explosion of twenty short tons of dynamite Distance: blast felt 85 miles away

- The island is roughly fifty feet wide and sits about two hundred feet from the Canadian border. - A 1879 explosion on Fox Island created a crater 60 feet wide and 16 feet deep after three tons of nitroglycerin detonated. - By 1906 the storage facilities held twenty short tons of dynamite (approximately 18,000 kilograms). - The wooden storage shanties had gaps between planks “wide enough to throw a cat through.” - Rogers later claimed the revolvers discharged that day were loaded with blanks; no expert evaluation of that claim appears in the record.

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