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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.
Well they have a clusterfuck of a problem and are looking for solutions. Sounds like nerd business to me.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Another article I read elsewhere said that some of the fuses could be triggered by contact with water (too unmotivated to find the link). The bomb casings have (presumably) started to rust and decay.. if only one bomb casing springs a leak.. it could blow - and set off the rest of the explosives. And if the explosives are water-tight, it means that they aren't decaying...
Personally I think the town should be evacuated, all the windows boarded up, shipping traffic diverted - and a torpedo lobbed at it from a couple of miles away to set the entire thing off and ensure it's made safe. I wouldn't want to ask anyone to go down there to try and defuse anything - it seems far too risky.
Because it's "News for Nerds," not "News For Nerds Who Only Care About Things That Run On Silicon." It's the obsessives who think that computers are the be-all and end-all of everything that matters who give nerds in general a bad name, IMNSGDHO.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
In 1917 250 tons of explosive gun powder, benzol, and gun cotton loaded on the French ship Mont-Blanc exploded and devastated the town of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The ship was carrying supplies to help the war effort over seas. A fire resulting from a collision with a Norwegian ship as the Mont-Blanc was leaving the harbor to join up with a convoy was triggered the blast 28 minutes after the minor collision.
The death toll rose to about 1,600 in a city with a population near 50,000. An explosion 5 times as powerful in a town 5 times smaller could conceivably wipe it off the face of the earth. 12,000 homes were damaged or destroyed not only by the blast, but also the fires that followed.
Wikipedia has some more information on the Halifax explosion.