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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.
After all this time that something is going to happen? Would some of the explosives now be inert?
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Who allowed this to happen? I mean, okay, the ship sank there, but why wasn't it cleaned up along with the millions of tons of other war junk from WWII that was disposed of?
This is a perfect example of the insurance dictum that 'claims do not go away'. You need to settle them (ie, fix the problem).
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
#text#
In 1970, government tests on the site showed a
blast would hurl a 1,000ft wide column of water,
mud, metal and munitions almost 10,000ft into
the air.
The shock of the blast would shatter almost
every window in Sheerness and damage buildings.
The explosion would also generate a 16ft high
wave that could sink a small craft.
#/text#
where did poster get the "with predictions of a 3 kilometre high wall of mud"????
Funny you should mention that, because it's exactly what they did in Canberra when the Government decided to implode the old Canberra Hospital. They touted it as a big tourist event... you know, come out and see us blow shit up.
Something went wrong. I think some twit decided to put some barrels of diesel in there for a bigger spectacle. Maybe someone else got the calculations wrong, but debris rained down on the crowd, some of it very big. Unbelievably, only one person was killed - which is a tragedy, but it had the potential to be a lot more.
-- james
Shameless lifted from Some random page about the Port of Chicago explosion.
On the evening of 17 July 1944, the empty merchant ship SS Quinault Victory was prepared for loading on her maiden voyage. The SS E.A. Bryan, another merchant ship, had just returned from her first voyage and was loading across the platform from Quinault Victory. The holds were packed with high explosive and incendiary bombs, depth charges, and ammunition - 4,606 tons of ammunition in all. There were sixteen rail cars on the pier with another 429 tons. Working in the area were 320 cargo handlers, crewmen and sailors.
At 10:18 p.m., a hollow ring and the sound of splintering wood erupted from the pier, followed by an explosion that ripped apart the night sky. Witnesses said that a brilliant white flash shot into the air, accompanied by a loud, sharp report. A column of smoke billowed from the pier, and fire glowed orange and yellow. Flashing like fireworks, smaller explosions went off in the cloud as it rose. Within six seconds, a deeper explosion erupted as the contents of the E.A. Bryan detonated in one massive explosion. The seismic shock wave was felt as far away as Boulder City, Nevada. The E.A. Bryan and the structures around the pier were completely disintegrated. A pillar of fire and smoke stretched over two miles into the sky above Port Chicago. The largest remaining pieces of the 7,200-ton ship were the size of a suitcase. A plane flying at 9,000 feet reported seeing chunks of white hot metal "as big as a house" flying past. The shattered Quinault Victory was spun into the air. Witnesses reported seeing a 200-foot column on which rode the bow of the ship, its mast still attached. Its remains crashed back into the bay 500 feet away.
All 320 men on duty that night were killed instantly. The blast smashed buildings and rail cars near the pier and damaged every building in Port Chicago. People on the base and in town were sent flying or were sprayed with splinters of glass and other debris. The air filled with the sharp cracks and dull thuds of smouldering metal and unexploded shells as they showered back to earth as far as two miles away. The blast caused damage 48 miles across the Bay in San Francisco.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
However, in France, the incidence of UXO is sufficiently high that local farmers plow up "items" on a regular basis. If they are small enough to be moved by an individual, they are taken out by hand and put in drop boxes by the road for ordnance techs to deal with. That's how common they are- farmers turned ordnance technicians.
While working on a test program with some British ordnance people, a story was related to me regarding buried UXO from WWII. Pipes were filled with nitroglycerin (NG), and buried perpendicular to landing strips in the UK. The idea was that they could be detonated in the event of invasion, rendering the landing strips useless. They were forgotten after WWII, and during construction some decades later, were re-discovered when a pipe containing NG was struck with a backhoe; I believe it killed the operator.
Making things worse during the remediation effort was that apartments had been built over part of the old runway. The Brits paid to bus the residents to the beach each day, and then bring them back in the afternoon after work for the day had halted. Evidently, they became quite cross when the work was finished a day early and everyone lined up for the buses, and the buses didn't come that day.
Anyway- the only thing worse than UXO is unexploded, toxic ordnance. Chemical warfare just hasn't been the same since the Chinese invented burning pepper upwind of the enemy, I'll tell ya.
Perhaps that's part of why the US _isn't_ one of the 152 countries that have signed the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty...
No. The reason is that the US uses landmines to defend the border between North Korea and South Korea. Its easy for those 152 countries to claim that landmines are unecessary when they don't have 30,000 men and women standing in the way of 1,000,000 mental communists.