Two bombs were detonated on the side of Interstate 85 Thursday as hundreds of drivers waited.

The blast stunned drivers on the busy stretch of road in Cleveland County.

“That's crazy,” driver Harvey Shelley said. “That is crazy.”

He was one the hundreds of drivers forced off of I-85 while a bomb squad took two homemade bombs out of a car.

The driver is a fugitive from Cherokee County, officials said. A deputy tried to serve a warrant on him Thursday morning, and he assaulted the deputy and led officers on a chase from Blacksburg, investigators said.

They didn't know he had two improvised explosive devices in his car, investigators said.

“You just don't think about it, driving around, that someone like that can be on the loose,” driver Carl Freund said.

Cleveland County investigators said they were fortunate that the bombs didn't go off during the chase.

“We just don't know what this could have done.  It could have exploded on the highway,” Capt. Joel Shores said.

The bomb squad from Gaston County sent a remote control robot to try to retrieve the devices. It couldn’t reach the devices inside of the car, so an officer in full protective gear walked up with a long pole, attached the devices to it and moved them away from the car.

“The dangers were unlimited of what could have happened,” Shores said.

They took no chances and detonated the devices in a hole that police dug nearby.