Good argument for visiting the local big box before power outages occur.

We are getting ready for a "maintenance power outage" planned to last about six hours this afternoon.Good opportunity to see how we will do without electricity (no internet, no ETS!! Oh no!)..

Power outages are common events these days - a routine emergency, if you will, and they are fairly easy to prepare for:

Step one: Eat all the ice cream before it melts....

It’s also a really good idea to make sure that if you keep explosives, you store them safely, under lock and key, and well-marked.

Naw, I keep my explosives in my dresser for easier access!!

it would be helpful if they could identify a candle first, and see that what they had was not made with wax and a wick. A fuse does not look like a wick, dynamite does not feel the same as a candle. This was just idiocy.

Idiocy may be too strong, definitely ignorance. There’s probably some form of cognitive dissonance at play with her needing to believe she was holding a candle, while she should have realized that what she was holding was not a candle — perception meets reality. Since she needed a candle, she lit the match.

I suspect that lighting in the basement was deficient, and in order to see what she was holding, she lit a match.....

But blasting caps are set off by a momentary spark. Did the dynamite really explode, or just burn vigorously?

Good question. I’ve never had the opportunity to work with dynamite, but as I recall the active ingredient is nitroglycerine in an absorbant base with stabilizers. Another question is what exactly was the “wick” she lit? How are the caps normally activated? I’m assuming not with the <1” wick you’d normally find on a candle; so how long was the wick on this “candle”?

Still, a stick of dynamite is not something of which most people have any experience, so her not recognizing it for what it was is almost understandable. That said, Montanero’s terminology may have been correct — idiot, both the victim and the idiot who left it for her to find.

Basically there are two types of blasting caps. One is electric and the other uses a burning fuse. It is somehow fishy that the stick seems to have been stored with cap and fuse. So it is hard to tell how long the fuse was. On top there are fuses with different burning speeds. A short fuse may burn for several seconds.
Most people should have experience with candles. If it does not feel like a candle it may be a bad idea to set it on fire in the first place.

This may be use of a regional term to describe a firecracker: we used to buy "quartersticks" for July 4th. They were cardboard tubes, usually red, with epoxied ends, a green fuse sticking out through one end, filled with...whatever they fill M-80s with. These were about the diameter of a 50 cent piece and maybe four inches long.
They look nothing like a candle.
I've seen the damage a handheld M-80 does--I would expect the damage described in the article, from one of these "quartersticks."

My experience with dynamite and blasting caps dates from, literally, fifty years ago.When transporting the materials, we had the caps and dynamite in different, separate vehicles. They never met until the dynamite was armed with the cap. My mentor instructed me to always know where the plunger was at all times, preferably in my hip pocket, and disconnected from the wires.

We did not blast during lightning storms...needless to say. Scholarly, mild mannered archaeologists does not usually employ dynamite, but when it absolutely, positively, must move, nothing beats a half stick.