3 detained in scrap metal blast

After four days of explosions, periodic evacuations and disrupted business, peace returned to Garner Road on Friday as experts finished destroying a cache of military anti-tank shells that had been dropped off at a Raleigh scrap yard.

Meanwhile, local and federal investigators said three men were arrested in Sanford and Harnett County during the hunt for the metal scroungers who sold the munitions to the scrap dealer. The trio may not have been directly involved in handling the explosives. Federal agents declined to give any details, but the men were charged only with immigration violations and, in one case, an unrelated weapons violation.

Investigators declined to release the men's names.

An Army demolition team touched off its final five explosions Friday, bringing the total for the week to 34, and by early evening residents were allowed to return to the mostly industrial area just south of Raleigh's Beltline.

Raleigh officials said in a news conference Friday afternoon that the ordeal lasted longer than they had expected but that the city had little choice about how to handle it.

"As always in these kinds of situations, public safety is most important," Mayor Charles Meeker said. "That's what's paramount, and that's how it's been handled."

Pauline Parker, 52, of Park Creek Apartments just outside the blast zone, was happy to be able to resume her life.

"I was very relieved, because that's a scary situation when you have bombs going off," Parker said. "It was a very traumatic experience."

The live munitions, including more than 20 anti-tank rounds, turned up in a load of scrap metal dropped off last week at Raleigh Metals Processors. Some of the ammunition exploded and injured two workers as it was being compacted into bales for recycling.

FBI involved

How the scroungers got the shells is still a mystery. An FBI spokeswoman in Charlotte said Friday that she couldn't release any new information about the investigation.

Working from identification given to the scrap yard, investigators traced the explosives to Sanford, and the two men detained by the Sanford police said the munitions had come from the Fort Bragg area, said Sanford police Capt. David Smith. He declined to elaborate, saying he did not want to harm the federal investigation.

"That's what the suspects told us in the course of our involvement," he said. "They gave us specific information, but I can't go into that."

Smith said his department found several spent shells and at least one live artillery round in the yard of a home in Sanford.

A spokesman for Fort Bragg, Tom McCollum, said Thursday that base officials had no idea whether the munitions had come from Bragg or how someone might have acquired them if they did.

Chain of custody strict

Experts on disposing of military munitions said that the types found at the scrap yard have been used by all U.S. ground forces, so they didn't necessarily come from an Army post.

They should be traceable, though, if the normal lot numbers stenciled on them hadn't deteriorated, said Wayne Galloway, a munitions disposal expert with the U.S. Army Engineering and Support Center in Hunstville, Ala., which oversees ordnance disposal for the Pentagon.

Galloway described a tight "cradle-to-grave" chain of custody when munitions are recycled. The contractors who perform the work are always retired military explosives experts, he said, and Army Corps of Engineers supervisors monitor every step.

Once the explosives are separated from the metal parts, Corps officials accompany the metal to a smelter or foundry. Often they will stay there until the metal is melted down.

Bragg officials said shells that don't explode when fired in training are supposed to be reported and then immediately destroyed by the same kind of explosives units that cleared the Raleigh recycling plant this week. Occasionally, though, duds go unnoticed because of the high volume of fire in an exercise.

McCollum said Thursday that he didn't think there had been any recent case of a soldier removing munitions to sell for scrap, but that he didn't know whether civilians had ever been caught scrounging on the base. Metal theft has become widespread in recent years with sharp upticks in prices for commodities such as copper.

Spotting live ammo

Greg Brown, the owner of the recycling plant in Raleigh, said Friday afternoon that his company routinely gets scrap from the military, but doesn't knowingly accept ammunition. He said he had arranged for a retired Army colonel to help train workers at both facilities on how to recognize live munitions. The workers would get another lesson before the Raleigh plant starts operating again, he said.

Smith, the Sanford police officer, said the plant workers probably weren't the only ones who didn't understand that the shells were dangerous. The fact that Sanford officers had found live ammo lying around in the scroungers' yard "makes me believe they just didn't know what they had," he said.

Brown toured the scrap yard late Friday and said the damage was minimal, confined to a few broken windows and a busted electrical panel. He plans to be open today.

(Researcher Becky Ogburn contributed to this report.)