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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.
Glad I still had time to change the vacation plans!
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.
Your Friend, O bin Laden.
Lets nuke it and sell the video on PPV.
i cant think of too many things designed these days that would survive 60+ years of being exposed to the elements, especially buried in a sand bank underwater... and then would still work close to specifications...
yep, they just dont build things the way they used to
Exploding things are cool. Every geek knows that.
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!
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.
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
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
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
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.
Did anybody else think of that episode of Gilligan's Island where Gilligan accidentally brings in a WWII mine while fishing, or was that just my own television warped mind?
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.
#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"????
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,
I suspect that the reason those articles do not cite a plan of action for defusing these explosives stems from the British governments indecision over whether they would rather protect millions upon millions in property or see a really really cool explosion.
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.
Remember that one of their biggest parties is for when somebody failed to blow something up in a big way: Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot. I don't think this guy would get a holiday of his own here in the States.
(Ha! Take that all you Brits who think all us Yanks are uncultured swine! A topical British cultural reference from an American! On behalf of my countrymen, Neener neener neener!)
But WAIT!!!!you're telling me that a large abandoned ship full of explosives existed exposed to the outside world for sixty some years and it WASN'T looted by hordes of pyro teenagers? There must be something fundamentally wrong with the teenagers across that ocean. Methinks not enough good ol american made rednek would fix it right up.
GITTERDUN!!!!!!!!
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
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.
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.
Nice to see the mods getting it right: the suggestion that anyone would go to Sheerness for their holiday definitely deserves +5 Funny.
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.
(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 !