‘Fire in the hole’ command lops off mountaintop

Wednesday, July 12, 2006 | 7:17 a.m.

Atop Crystal Ridge in Henderson this week, Sanders Construction Co., Drilling & Blasting set off an explosion that sent more than 8,000 cubic yards of rock tumbling down from near the peak.

The blast went a long way toward clearing the way for 15 lots that overlook a picturesque valley - lots that one day, Sanders officials say, will sell for $5 million apiece, not counting the cost of the custom homes that will be built on them.

Just seconds before the blast, Sanders job supervisor Pete Tramontanas, a towering former UNLV football player with several days' beard growth, gave the radio command: "Fire in the hole."

Tramontanas sat several hundred yards from the blast site in a company truck. On the driver's side window was a small sticker with an ominous warning about doing the job right: "You can't fix stupid."

In the hours leading up to Monday's 3 p.m. blast, state-licensed blaster Dennis Muaina and his crew lowered bright orange booster explosives and detonators connected to bright yellow cords into 37 holes dug 20 feet deep.

They chased those six-inch blasting sticks with lots of ammonium nitrate, a confettilike white fertilizer dyed pink from soaking in volatile red diesel fuel. Several thousand pounds of explosives would be used.

Eleven years ago, Muaina put aside his bachelor's degree in education and a possible teaching career to do this work.

"The thrill of this job is the end product - seeing a lot of big rock turned into a pile of broken rock," says Muaina, his skin, like Tramontanas', deeply tanned and leathery from hours in the sun.

"A lot of this (setting the charges) is calculating the mathematics, but some of it also is from the experience of having done the work for so long. Much of what we do is making it as safe as possible."

Nowhere was that more evident than when Tramontanas and Muaina, communicating by walkie-talkies, did not get a radio response from a laborer named Burk. Burk, near the mountaintop 500 feet from the blast site, was holding the pen-sized detonator.

After a siren gave a five-minute warning before the scheduled blast, Muaina ordered a delay, left his safe spot 1,000 feet below the explosion and took off in a four-wheel-drive vehicle back up the steep incline to determine whether something had gone wrong.

Following moments of nervous silence on the radio, Burk acknowledged he was ready.

"We had lost you, Burk," Tramontanas says. The worker replies that his radio must have temporarily gone on the fritz.

Muaina returns to his safe spot and radios Tramontanas: "It's all yours, Pete."

Tramontanas gave the order, and Burk snapped the thumb-operated trigger, sending aluminum dust flickering down hundreds of feet of bright green shock tube to ignite the explosives.

Clunky brown clouds shot in several directions from the blast site as a series of soft, muffled pops from the explosions cleared enough rock to fill 80 trucks that each hold 100 tons.

Noise from the engines of the big trucks - carrying debris from previous explosions near the site - drowned out much of the blast noise.

There was no noticeable ground movement about a thousand feet away from the blast, where a Sun reporter was situated.

Danny Sanders says that the explosion put his company past the 7.5 million mark of cubic yards broken up for the project. About 4 million more cubic yards must still be blasted.