17 hurt in huge blast during LAPD detonation of explosive devices

A major explosion in South Los Angeles on Wednesday evening damaged homes and injured 17 people, including police officers, as a bomb squad attempted to safely detonate improvised explosive devices that had been seized from a home along with about 5,000 pounds of illegal fireworks. At a news conference, Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore said officials responding to a home on the 700 block of East 27th Street had found several thousand pounds of illegal fireworks as well as improvised explosive devices that were “more unstable.” An LAPD bomb squad transferred the improvised devices into the iron chamber of a semitruck that’s meant to contain such explosive material, he said. Police detonated the devices at 7:37 p.m., believing that the vehicle would be able to contain the explosion, but there was a “total catastrophic failure of that containment vehicle,” Moore said. The LAPD will work with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to investigate who supplied Cejas with the fireworks and the improvised devices, as well as to review the action taken by officers to see “what we can do to avoid this type of circumstance from ever happening again,” Moore said.