They're doing conscruction on the courthouse where I work.  Today, they were testing the earth underneath the site of the new courthouse wing to make sure it was structurally sound to build on. 

The reason for this testing is presumably because they discovered the parking garage is built on a sink hole, and have had to do major reinforcement construction to "prop" the garage up.

The way you do this testing is by digging deep holes and detonating large amounts of explosives down in the holes. 

Today's went something like this.  BOOM!

We knew it was going to happen today, so I planned to be at our office across the street instead of in the actual building.  It shook our office it was so intense. 

It was scary as F, even though I knew it was coming (i had 30 minutes notice), it wasn't probably going to hurt anyone or anything, and it was being done by licensed construction companies. 

This got me to thinking about what it would be like living in Israel or Iraq or any other part of the world we've messed up (in all fairness, many of them messed themselves up with only minimal help from us).  That shit would be happening all the time. 

Gets you thinking.

ps: i also got trapped in the elevator today.  It sucked.  20 people crammed into it before we got stuck too.  I yelled at them.  I'm not even joking.  I actually said "Why did so many of you try to cram in here?"