A single Los Angeles Police Department officer has been suspended for 10 days for his role in an explosion in which members of a bomb squad failed to carefully calculate the explosive power of a cache of illegal fireworks that intentionally exploded on a residential street in Los Angeles. 2021.
The massive blast damaged or destroyed 17 homes and caused a number of injuries to residents and officers, and investigative reports from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the LAPD said accused the bomb squad members of making the catastrophic mistake.
The LAPD found that the unnamed suspended officer had been “deficient in his duties which contributed to the excessive amount of explosive material loaded and detonated in the total containment vessel”.
ATF officers discovered that officers caused the uncontrolled explosion by “inadvertently overloading” a special containment truck without calculating the explosive power of the fireworks.
The LAPD after-action report found that “the failure of the TCV occurred as a result of miscalculations by Bomb Squad personnel”
The LAPD monitoring agency found that “it was never the practice of the bomb squad to physically weigh a suspected explosive”.
They are releasing the costs of damages caused by an illegal explosion of fireworks that police carried out on June 30 in a south Los Angeles neighborhood.
In 2022, the LAPD said it replaced bomb squad supervisors and began training eight new bomb officers to replace some of the officers involved in the 2021 accident.
Other officers will likely face disciplinary action as a result of the outburst, but until cases are completed and penalties are imposed, they will not be made public.
This story first appeared on Telemundo 52’s sister station NBCLA. Click here to read this story in English.