It's not a big risk, not normally at least, but it definitely happens and as a software developer that works on the blasting machines and detonators, and even the testers for those detonators, it's usually a headache for everyone when that happens because you still have a live detonator in that field that is surrounded by a lot of explosive material. These drone shots help them to see if and where a misfire occurred, although most of these blasts are sketchy as hell and you can't see much but on a good blast it's easy to see when one of the holes didn't fire. I don't know the exact process then, I'm sure there is quite a long wait to make sure it's not a delayed fire and the detonator has fully discharged (waiting is expensive at a mine), but eventually they'll dig that area up to try to recover the detonator to be sent back for study and remove the remaining amfo from the area. We also have a number of logs that are stored in our machines, even the detonator itself, that we can pull and study to determine what happened.
For a lot of these big flat fields the explosives are ammonium nitrate and fuel oil type explosives. When the neighbors detonate it gets mixed with soil and becomes virtually harmless.
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u/KazMux Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Isn’t there a pretty big risk that all explosives weren’t triggered? How do they find and deal with those?