Slashdot Mirror
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!
Your Friend, O bin Laden.
Let's go set them off and see! Waiting is no fun!
My other car is first.
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!
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.
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.
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,
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!
500 people died after burning for 6 days
Ouch. That had to hurt.
Personally, I probably would put the flaming people out after a day or two.
Three days.. tops.
The
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.
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.
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.
Anyway, when I got back from my sailing weekend I did a little research on SS Richard Montgomery. The history is that the ship ran aground at neap tide. Troops were busy unloading the ordnance when the ship started breaking up. Further unloading deemed too dangerous. Incidently in later years an oil refinery was built nearby on the Isle of Grain, probably closer than the town Sheerness.
To quote from one of the articles I found in my research -
Of the three and a half thousand tons of explosives left, most contain TNT and are impervious to seawater. It is highly probable that their fuses have long since deteriorated and would therefore need something else to set them off. Unfortunately on the deck above these are approximately one hundred and seventy five tons of fragmentation cluster bombs fully armed and ready to go. These are considered to be the main danger, because if the decking collapses these bombs could fall on top of the others and set the whole thing off.
So it doesn't seem like the fuses are the problem, but the cluster bombs could possibly set off the TNT.
Brought to you by the author of such childrens' classics as "Some Kittens can Fly!" and "All Dogs go to Hell."
(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 !