ILLEGAL FIREWORKS BLOW UP

Officials on Thursday are investigating what went wrong when what was meant to be a controlled detonation of fireworks by the Los Angeles Police Department ended in a major explosion that injured 17 people in a South Los Angeles neighborhood.

The blast came around 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in the 700 block of East 27th Street, where police had spent the day seizing a large cache of fireworks from a home. They came across about 40 homemade “coke can-sized” devices with powder and fuses on them, and 200 smaller similar devices. The bomb squad determined them to be “very volatile.”

“That’s why it was decided to really blow that stuff up here in place, in a controlled manner,” LAPD Lt. Raul Jovel said Thursday during a news briefing. The crew loaded what is believed to be less than ten pounds of the destructive material onto a commercial grade semi-truck with an iron chamber with a venting system.