The booms heard in Oak Ridge on Wednesday were from explosives training for law enforcement officers at the University of Tennessee Arboretum on South Illinois Avenue, an official said.

Twenty-nine officers from across the country are training in a 10-week National Forensics Academy course offered by the UT Law Enforcement Innovation Center in Oak Ridge. That course includes crime scene investigation, and one aspect of that training involves investigating car bombs, suicide bombers, and improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, said Don Green, executive director of the Law Enforcement Innovation Center. On Wednesday, an explosives ordinance team from the Knoxville Police Department used explosives to show officers what they would have to go through at that type of scene.

The explosives training session was on Wednesday only. [Read more…]