Explosives; magazines.
[Shall be] …
(4) Reasonably bullet resistant.
…
(9) Posted with suitable danger signs so located that a bullet passing through the face of a sign will not strike the magazine.
Mine Safety and Health Administration
Title 30 CFR § 77.1301
[Why do people shoot at signs? I just don’t get it. I know that they do because I have seen a lot of shot-up road signs.
And shooting at an explosives magazine is well beyond shooting at the yellow 35 MPH caution sign for going around the curve ahead. It’s nominating yourself for a Darwin award. You would think that seeing a sign that that even hints at “EXTREME DANGER! EXPLOSIVES!” would be enough to give Cletus a clue to keep the muzzle pointed in some other direction. But no. We have to have a government regulation to put the sign in a location such that it has a proper backstop between it and the nearby magazine.
At times one has to wonder about the viability of the human race or speculate that perhaps we discovered fire 100,000 years too soon.—Joe]
Just an observation and perhaps a question. But isn’t the Taj Mahal your magazine for the purposes of mixing Boomerite? Or am I missing something?
I know that the signage my company sells is generally aluminum or fiberglass. Neither of those materials are very bullet resistant.
Here, hold my beer and watch this.
It used to be that we mixed explosives in and very near to the Taj. We moved our production facility over the hill to what we call Mecca. The Taj is just used for storage now.
I’ve never really understood the sign shooting either, but a friend did once tell a story that included shooting at signs. When he was a teenager in rural northern Wisconsin he was riding around with some friends drinking beer and looking for excitement. One of the friends had a .22 rifle and was shooting from the moving vehicle. Some signs were used as targets. That probably typifies the circumstances under which signs are shot at.
The interesting part of the story was the deer that just happened to come out of the woods as they went by. The kid let fly with the .22. The deer dropped like a rock. Incredibly lucky shot. These kids were irresponsible juvenile delinquents, but they knew they would get in much more trouble for wasting meat, even out of season, than for driving around drinking beer and shooting up road signs. So, they field dressed the deer using a tiny key-chain knife one of them had, and brought the carcass home to one of their families.
Its sad to think that, for all those stupid warning signs (I was reminded this morning by the “do not stick your fingers under the rim of a running lawnmower” sticker on the base of my lawnmower), there is an even dumber human being who required said sticker to be in place. Personally, I think the human race would be much better off if all warning signs were removed for a period of time. Culling the herd, so to speak.
My car had a recall. The recall was to install TWO new BIG YELLOW STICKERS under the fuel hatch saying “DIESEL FUEL ONLY”.
Because the existing half dozen signs saying the same thing weren’t enough…
I think it not so much that we discovered fire so long ago as it is that we learned how not to burn ourselves so soon thereafter. This preemptive insulation from the consequences for our actions has gradually built up the species Stupid Quotient to the level you note today.
Mind you, I like not carrying around a lot of scar tissue on my dermis, but there are always unintended consequences to everything we do.
Kronk ask Grog hold rock. No good. Kronk smell funny, no hair!
People used to shoot at the dynamite cars on railroads all the time. Blew themselves (and everyone else) up a few times doing it, but it didn’t stop them.
In the California Channel Islands, on East Anacapa is a lighthouse, a cabin, orginally for the lighthousekeeper, but now for the Park Ranger, another couple of buildings, and a water tank. The story goes that sportfishermen used to shoot at the water tank with the rifles used for killing sharks that got hooked instead of the tuna or swordfish, much to everyone else’s annoyance, until a building was built around the water tank with a steeple and pointy windows to resemble a church. According to the legend, the shooting at the water tank stopped.