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British Town Worried About WWII Ammo Ship Wreck
Radical Rad writes "For 60 years, 1.4 kilotons of unstable world war II bombs have lain in the rusting wreck of a US cargo ship half-submerged on a sandbank in the river Thames. If it explodes it will be one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions ever with predictions of a 3 kilometre high wall of mud, water, and metal fragments causing devastation to the nearby town of Sheerness in Kent." The BBC has more.
no, just unstable... which would be scarier than stable explosives
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hmmm "The government has been advised that doing nothing isn't really a sensible option any more."
... with something having a continuous risk, no matter how small, the chance of it exploding approaches one over time... it seems like something should have been done immediately... certainly not 60 years later. The only excuse I can think of is the hope that the technology would improve enough to find a safer way to safeguard the town, but surely no one thought this would happen quick enough to be worth the risk... this sounds like a bunch of people not willing to take a risk and just waiting for the next person to take on the responsibility... pah.
She said the last examination, in 2003, showed the site to be no more dangerous than in the past.
Alright, according to the article the bombs could detonate at any point spontaneously, but the risk hasn't changed from the past,
WANNAWIKI Wannawiki WannaWiki WANNAWIKI!
According to the linked BBC piece, the wave caused by a potential explosion would not be 3km high, it would be 16ft high. The New Scientist makes mention of a 3000m column of debris: that is material would reach a maximum height of 3km. This is entirely different from a tsunami-like wave baselessly alluded to by the Slashdot blurb.
As a participent/observer, I can attest that (ignoring some misc. issues), it blow'ed up real good! ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
If it's a U.S. cargo ship, are we responsible for cleaning up our mess?
Alternate solution #1 - make the guy who sunk it clean it up.
Alternate solution #2 -Make the guy who started the war clean it up.
There are UXO's from WWI and WWII all over Europe. From all sides. The get cleaned up as they are found, by whomever finds them. Hopefully cleaned up under control.
By coincidence, I had just read the New Scientist's article about this, which is the source of the BBC article, but in much more depth and with many more details,
The Richard Montgomery is 2Km+ from Sheerness and 10Km+ from Southend-on-Sea [locally referred to as "Southend-on-Mud"] the other side of the estuary.
Furthermore the wreck is underwater (!!) which is going to substantially reduce the flying debris and airbourne shockwave ... the exact effects depending on the tides. Southend's tidal range is about 5-6m so I would expect it to be similar on the other side of the estuary.
Largest ever non-nuclear blast has already occured.
Does that sentence make anyone elses head hurt? Of course it has occured. That may have been a big explosion, but this would then suplant that as being the largest. The thing about being the biggest/largest/tallest/longest etc of something, is that you only keep the title as long as nothing else comes along and surpasses you.
I thought that the explosion along the Siberian pipeline was the largest non-nuclear anyways.
I've just signed legislation that'll outlaw Russia forever. We'll begin bombing in five minutes.
What happens when explosives are stored improperly (and I can't imagine anything more improper) is the material separates. This leaves the inert material and nitroglycerine. Thats about as unstable as it gets. Nitro is bad news.
That's, of course, only the case for explosives which use nitroglycerine.
As this is WWII ordnance, we're probably not looking at any of those. Could be straight TNT, which is extremely stable, but various alkali compounds of the sort found in seawater can react with it to form a variety of compounds that are unstable to heat and impact. Could be Composition B, which is a mixture of TNT and RDX, so the same thing applies, or Comp A, which is straight RDX and a plasticizer, not so stable as Comp B. Ammonium picrate was used as a bursting charge, and is incredibly stable to shock and friction, but, again, seawater. Could also be Torpex, another popular one, and another RDX/TNT mixture. Problem with all of these is primarily the seawater environment reacting with the TNT to produce unstable products.
Nitrocellulose wasn't used in any of the common WWII high-explosives, nor was nitroglycerin; most high explosives of the day were varying mixtures of TNT, RDX, and sometimes PETN or Tetryl. Nitrocellulose isn't a high explosive at all; it doesn't detonate, it deflagrates, and the propagation of the chemical reaction through the material is below the speed of sound. What it was for, up until and probably throughout WWII, was a propellant, a replacement for gunpowder. It only explodes at all when confined; flash paper is basically straight nitrocellulose, and you can light that stuff off while holding it in your hand.
It's not a holiday for Guy Fawkes. It's a holiday that celebrates his failure and execution; he is (or rather was, I don't know many places that still do this) burned in effigy every year.
The destruction of ripple rock to clear a safe passage for shipping holds that title. 1375 tons of explosives going off about 10 feet underwater. It rattled windows 65 miles away. There's an article here .
Actually it might be a blessing if it did happen.
If you want to know more about the dubious joys of living on the isle of Sheppey (on which Sheerness is located) then you can find out at the most excellent Isle of Sheppey tourists guide.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
Actually, Port Chicago has been made a national memorial:
http://www.nps.gov/poch/index.htm
A pretty big deal actually was made of the explosion; there was a full board of inquiry and it did result in some procedural changes to the way ammunition was handled, as well as the reduction, still in 1944, of the number of blacks at ammunition depots reduced to 30% of staff. At Port Chicago, all of the loaders were black, only the officers were white.
Shamefully, the handful loaders who survived were court-martialed for mutiny because they refused to load ammunition until safety changes were made. While they were released from prison in 1946, well short of the long sentences they were given, that doesn't change the wrong that was done to them.
More info on Port Chicago is here:
http://www.usmm.org/portchicago.html
(Sorry to post as AC - I didn't register yet.)
Cluster bombs based on a spring-loaded collection of small bomblets were used for delivering both HE and incendiary charges in WW2.
I live in a dutch town (Nijmegen) that was destroyed by US bombers, partially using cluster-bombs, in August 1944. Over 800 Dutch were killed and zero Germans. The attack was an accident when several aircraft could not find their primary target in the industrialised area of Germany. The resulting fires attracted other 'geographically-embarassed' aircraft....
I'm certainly glad I don't live in Sheerness though !
yep, they just dont build things the way they used to
The Liberty ships were designed with one goal in mind: build ships faster than the German Uboat force could sink them. And they succeeded! The Liberty ships were assembled (from pre-manufractured components) by mostly unskilled labour on the shipyards of Henry J. Kaiser within only 80 hours! On these shipyards, 140 Liberty ships per month would be completed.
The Liberty ships were never built to last. Their quality was rather poor. Definately not up to todays standards in shipbuilding.
--- The light at the end of the tunnel is probably a burning truck.
TNT is most definitely not nitroglycerin. Where the hell do you people come up with this stuff?
TNT is trinitrotoluene, otherwise known as C6H2(NO2)3CH3, or 2,4,6-trinitromethylbenzene.
Nitroglycerine is otherwise known as C3H5N3O9, or 1,2,3-Tris-nitrooxy-propane.
Nitroglycerine is prepared by nitrating glycerine. TNT is prepared by nitrating toluene. They are two very different molecules, with very different properties.
I fucking love when people repeat as truth completely inaccurate information, without even the merest thought they might be spouting bullshit. I swear, some days I'm not sure whether I'm reading Slashdot or Fark.
Most WWII bombs used nitro based explosives.
Only in the sense that most high explosives are nitrogen compounds. Most WWII bombs did not, in fact, use nitroglycerin, or explosives based upon nitroglycerin. Go look it up, I'll wait.
Torpex is RDX, TNT, and powdered aluminum. Tetrytol is Tetryl and TNT. Picratol is picric acid and TNT. Pentolite is PETN and TNT. Octol is HMX and TNT. Minol is TNT, ammonium nitrate, and aluminum. Amitol is TNT and ammonion nitrate. Comp A is RDX and a plasticizer. Comb B is TNT, RDX, and wax. Baronol is TNT, barium nitrate, and aluminum powder. The PTX family is RDX, tetryl or PETN, and TNT.
Those are the major explosives used during WWII. Not a single one has nitoglycerin in it.
As for Nitrocellulose only exploding when confined. What do you think a bomb casing is, if not confinement?
There is a tremendous difference between an explosive and a high explosive. Even black powder will explode when confined, but black powder never, ever detonates. You can make a pipe bomb out of match heads, but nobody who knows anything would describe matches as a high explosive. High explosives detonate, meaning that the reaction front propagates through the material supersonically. Low-order explosives don't do that, they simply deflagrate, burn rapidly. Nobody in their right mind would use a low-order explosive like nitrocellulose in a bomb, not when anything more suitable was available.
I repeat: neither nitroglycerin nor nitrocellulose were routinely used as bomb fill in WWII. I won't rule out some Yugoslavian partisan group maybe mixing up some guncotton and using it in makeshift mortars, but that's about all it would have been used for.