A few days following the 4th of July 2013 Bill O’Malley piloted his dad’s pontoon on a popular Northern Indiana lake while his kids along with all the grandkids went tubing. When one child fell off Bill circled around with the pontoon to pick him up. As he brought the boat around and into position he spied a white ball bobbing on the water. When he retrieved it he discovered it wasn’t a ball at all, but a homemade explosive. A plastic ball 6-8” in circumference had been cut in half, filled with gunpowder or TNT, heat sealed together and then taped. It had a hole drilled and a wick inserted in the top. Apparently the perpetrator(s) had lit the device and thrown it in the lake during or after the recently held holiday fireworks display, but it malfunctioned or the water extinguished it, and they left it to float on the busy lake filled with families and children during the biggest and busiest holiday of the summer.
Bill brought the device back and showed it to his dad. Recognizing what it was and the possible danger it represented they decided it best to put it someplace safe until after the busy weekend and everyone had gone home before placing it in the garbage. Bill put the device high above a window in the boathouse located beneath the large deck that faces the lake at the front of their cottage. Besides being the storage for boat motors and equipment it also has a refrigerator for drinks, snacks and other things that kept children and adults going in and out all weekend.
By Monday morning everyone had gone home and Bill’s dad, George, forgot about the device, and was in the garage nearby repairing a motor. At the same moment his wife, Roxie, was in the cottage working on a computer when an explosion knocked her off her chair. Running down the steps and to the back of the house Roxie didn’t see George and assumed he had been in the boathouse when the explosion occurred. In a panic she frantically yelled for neighbors to call 9-1-1.
The O’Malley’s boathouse has doors at both ends. Luckily those doors at that moment were open allowing the explosion to vent outward. Still it was powerful enough to blow one wall out including the door and sending fascia boards, vinyl siding and other debris almost 100 feet into the neighbors yard. Fortunately the blast did not cause a fire and since it vented out, it didn’t cause the three or more 5-gallon petro cans stored in the boathouse to ignite and explode with it. More importantly, there were no children playing outside.
It took the all-volunteer emergency services fire and EMS 20 minutes to answer the call, coming from a nearby lake community a few miles away. Being volunteers and amateurs they had no expertise in these matters, couldn’t determine a source and didn’t stick around to conduct an investigation.
After they left George finally remembered the device that Bill had put above the window for safekeeping. That turned out to be the source of the explosion. He and Roxie then went carefully over the interior of the boathouse (they had to clean up the debris) and found several pieces of what had been the plastic ball that contained the explosives.
George presumes this was a homemade fireworks device that someone carelessly left in the lake after it failed to explode. He is more generous than I am. Such a device raises a number of serious questions concerning who, what, where, when and why? Was this a homemade fireworks or a prototype? This area is riddled with people with extreme views. Militia ideas and extremist views are popular in this part of rural Indiana. For whatever reason the incident was never, to my knowledge, reported to any local police agency. The attitude and belief is that whoever the responsible individuals were, they were just some guys trying to have a bit of fun.
The ease in being able to make such a device suggests all the propaganda we are fed by government and media about “terrorism” is just that. Propaganda. It’s a false flag. We say we are worried about terrorists and see government intrude in every area of our lives, shred the Bill of Rights, spy on everything we do and yet we make no move to remove an obvious and openly available source for acquiring explosives for building weapons-FIREWORKS!
Do you recall the Boston Marathon bombings and how the Tsarnaev brothers bought the most powerful fireworks they could find to drain the gunpowder to make their pressure cooker bombs? They accomplished their goal with ease and without question or raising any suspicion what so ever. What are we thinking? Who are we kidding?