My Brother Set Off A Bomb In The Bayou That Could Have Destroyed Our Neighborhood

A woman tells the Whole Truth about how her brother and his friends set off a homemade bomb that exploded over an oil pipeline.

July 7, 2017 12:16 pm,

When she was in elementary school, a Houston woman watched her brother and his friends build a bomb out of Fourth of July fireworks. They wanted to use the bomb in the World War II games they played on a bayou near her home. The explosion was more dangerous than she realized, and set off a terrorism investigation.

“This was during the Cuban Missile Crisis and [the police] were questioning my mother about seeing strangers in the neighborhood, maybe even somebody Cuban-looking. They said, well, the magnitude of this explosion had blown an almost six-foot deep hole right above the Shell gas pipeline and it could have blown up our whole neighborhood.”

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Written by Caroline Covington.