Explosives detonation rattles Trapper Creek DYNAMITE: Man had stored them in car years ago.

Authorities evacuated about 50 homes Friday night in the Trapper Creek area after the discovery of roughly 550 pounds of aging, unstable explosives in the trunk of an abandoned station wagon, troopers say.
An explosives team from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson destroyed the cache -- and the car -- at 2 a.m. Saturday. No one was injured, though some neighbors reported shattered windows and shell-shocked pets.
The explosives had been in the car since the mid-1990s, when a man who owns the property moved them there from a nearby railroad boxcar or boxcars, said wildlife trooper Dan Valentine.
The man has been living in one of the railroad cars, said trooper spokeswoman Beth Ipsen. She declined to identify him because he has not been charged with a crime.
The incident, which rallied several government agencies and displaced neighboring families for hours, began when the man left a message for Valentine to visit his property for what at the time were unknown reasons, troopers said.
Valentine had just finished teaching boating safety at a nearby elementary school when he drove to the property at Mile 3.5 Petersville Road, thinking the man wanted to talk about wildlife.
At about 2:45 p.m., the property owner walked Valentine to an AMC Eagle station wagon near the end of an old airstrip off Petersville Road. Inside the trunk the trooper saw a collection of tubes, tied end to end, under a blanket in the trunk.
"I could read 'danger, high explosive' on all these tubes and I could see something had leaked, or weeped out of those tubes and crystallized," he said
The stash was 15 to 20 years old and included ammonium nitrate and nitroglycerine, Ipsen said.
Valentine, who said he is unfamiliar with explosives, snapped photos of the material and dialed a military ordnance disposal team on his cell phone.
"I just felt like I needed to call someone," the trooper said.
The property owner told Valentine the explosives had been inside railroad cars he had purchased years ago. He'd placed them in the station wagon, which was about 75 feet from the railroad crew car he calls home, in the mid-1990s, Valentine said.
The man lives in one of the railroad cars on the property, troopers said. He seemed to hope authorities could simply haul the explosives away. Or burn them, the trooper said.
But an Air Force explosives team arrived at 8 p.m. and deemed the explosives unstable, troopers said. Authorities began evacuating all nearby homes.
Tom Taylor, who lives in a subdivision east of the airstrip, was walking his dog when he saw the first fire truck. Soon, rescue workers on four-wheelers arrived to say Taylor and his wife needed to leave.
Trapper Creek Elementary School, located just outside the evacuation area, served as a temporary shelter. A trooper helicopter flew above, making sure no one had wandered into the blast radius.
Trooper and Mat-Su officials made the call to detonate the explosives, Ipsen said.
More than a mile to the east, Trapper Creek general store owner Charlie Hill said he woke to a bang that shook his house like an earthquake.
More than a mile to the west, Valentine, the wildlife trooper, saw a flash, followed by a tremor that rattled his patrol car.
Nothing was left of the station wagon after the explosion, troopers said.
Taylor returned to his home to find his neighbor had lost a window in the blast and his cats -- Tigger, Shapeke and Harry -- were traumatized.
"The cats, they didn't forgive us ... Hair was pretty fluffed up as they walked around," Taylor said.