A barn belonging to a local troublemaker was set on fire by authorities who feared he had booby-trapped his land with hundreds of pounds of explosives and an elaborate system of tunnels.
An explosion inside the barn sent flames shooting out Wednesday night after authorities used blasting caps to trigger the fire.Carl Drega had burned down his own home Tuesday during a four-hour rampage in which he gunned down four people before he was shot to death. Authorities found bombmaking manuals and other weapons books in the smoldering ruins and an estimated 600 pounds of ammonium nitrate on his property.
Authorities said Drega, who had a long-running feud with local officials over zoning and other property issues, bought 61 1/2 gallons of diesel fuel Tuesday before his rampage. They also said he had mixed at least some diesel fuel with the ammonium nitrate. That was the mixture used in the deadly bombings of New York's World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City federal building.
Associate Attorney General Michael Ramsdell said it could be a day or two before investigators could explore the tunnels under Drega's secluded property on the bank of the Connecticut River that separates the state from Vermont.
The land was the center of a decades-old dispute Drega had with the town. In the early 1970s, the town sued over Drega's refusal to apply for a building permit. Drega, a construction worker and machinery operator and repairman, lost the lawsuit at about the same time his wife became ill and died.