Explosive camp trains demolition kids

"Some people like baseball, others like math – I just like to set off bombs," he said. "I figure here, learning how to do it properly is better than messing around with it at home, right?" Meadows is one of 20 teenage campers enrolled in a weeklong explosion camp in the Missouri Ozarks. At the camp, high school students from as far away as Egypt and Hawaii shoot dynamite, TNT and plastic explosives. The camp's leader, Paul Worsey, a professor at the University of Missouri, Rolla, uses the camp as a way to attract new recruits into the unglamorous field of mine engineering. He recruits students to help carry on the industry, which is facing a serious personnel shortage...

During his week at camp, Niels Zussblatt, a teen from St. Louis, helped blast a rock from deep in a mine, obliterated a watermelon, cut steel beams and set off a "wall of fire."