25 years ago: Fire team takes workshop on bomb site investigation

From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for May 8, 1987:

Members of the Douglas County Fire Investigation Unit were spending most of this week learning about explosives. Unit members were participating in a four-day, 32-hour Advanced Explosives Investigative Techniques school in a quarry south of Lawrence. Instructors for the classes included agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms of the U.S. Treasury Department, from the U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Division in Fort Riley, and from a private investigative firm in Kansas City. Participants were taught how to recognize if an explosive had been set and how to collect and tag evidence found at a bomb scene. For their final project, instructors detonated three different types of bombs in three vehicles and the class split into groups to investigate. “We searched the vehicle to find out what caused the explosion, what type of device was used to set it off, such as a timer or an electric or non-electric fuse, what type of material made up the bomb, such as a plastic explosive, a gasoline explosive or dynamite,” said Lawrence Fire Dept. Lt. Gregg Crossman, who added that three pipe bombs had been set off in Lawrence in the previous five years.