Hi...I was just wondering if anyone knows what is causing the loud explosion-like noise close to my home on Hwy 45 in Eight Mile. My neighbors and I all came running out of our homes at about 8:20 or so tonight wondering if we were in a war zone. What in the world is going on? We heard it about about 4 or 5 times tonight...
Laugh... I read a story last week about a neighborhood that had been experiencing something similar for several years. Every once in a while between midnight and 6am there would be a loud bang and brilliant flash of light. Just one. Then it might be a month or more before it happened again.
After a couple of years of this someone finally went to the police who reluctantly agreed to set up a camera and record the event. Eventually they did catch it on film and they were amazed at the flash and the sound. After doing a very through investigation that eliminated any cause in the immediate area they set up a second camera. Eventually they caught the event again.
By looking at the shadows cast by the explosion they were able to tell that they were occurring about 30 feet in the air over a parking lot of a condo. They re-pointed the two cameras and waited. Sure enough it happened again.
What they caught on tape amazed them. A man living in the condos had tossed a firework from his third story balcony out into the parking lot at two in the morning. When questioned and confronted with the video he confessed saying that he was pissed off at his neighbors and had been for years. When police searched his condo they found drugs, weapons and not surprisingly a large stash of illegal fireworks.
But as to your question, it might have been the tailgate of a dump truck. At night the sound carries a long way. And as a former dump truck driver I can tell you that it's important to clean out the bed after dumping a load and the easiest way to do that is to cause the tailgate to slam hard into the bed while it is raised up; several times. The resulting "BOOMS" are loud when it's done right.
