Bart Kemper (PE, DFE), Krista Wohlfeil, Paul Messner (FBI-ret), and William Sayin (Booze Allen Hamilton) put on a four-hour seminar on explaining the basis of blast, blast mechanics, terminal effects of blast events, and how to gather information for different situations. Kemper and Sayin were Army combat engineer officers with time in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wohlfeil was an Army ammunition specialist who served two tours in Somalia doing work including clearing old Soviet ammunition bunkers and destroying ordnance. Messner is a retired FBI Special Agent specializing in explosive threat events who has also served as a volunteer firefighter and fire investigator.
Together they put together four hours of well-received education for the American Academy of Forensic Scientists at their 2026 Annual Scientific Meeting, held this year in New Orleans, La. The Kemper Engineering team took advantage of the short drive time to the conference to bring a variety of realistic inert examples of pipe bombs, a suicide belt, and a number of notorious terrorist explosive devices, put together by the team at Inert Products. In order to help keep reference materials to open source, a variety of readily available guides were used as well as Bart’s paper regarding explosives and engineering in Iraq (2007) and in Afghanistan (2019), the latter including the world’s largest IED captured to date. Theya also presented various field techniques for gathering data as well a presented advanced modeling techniques.
Illustration of blast wave reflection and rarefication (going around corners), which is why blast modeling can be a key tool in evaluating blast effects in complex built-up areas.
Most explosions are not terrorist threats. The blast effects from a natural gas explosion is largely the same as other types of explosives, and documenting the results can be just as important as a criminal activity. Shows the 2010 gas main explosion in San Bruno, California.
Guidance from Paul Messner regarding evidence collection and procedures.
Inert examples of some of the more notorious exposive devices in this century.
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