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Massive Ukraine Munitions Blasts May Have Been Caused By a Drone (bbc.com)
dryriver writes: The BBC reports that 20,000 people are being evacuated from the immediate area around a munition dump in Ukraine that has gone up in flames. The 350 hectare munition dump near Kharkiv is around 100km (60 miles) from fighting against Russian-backed separatists and was used to supply military units in the conflict zone in nearby Luhansk and Donetsk. A drone was reported to have been used in an earlier attempt to set the facility on fire in December 2015. Authorities are now investigating whether someone possibly flew a drone over the facility that dropped an explosive device that caused the stored munitions to catch fire and explode. Ukrainian authorities believe that the conflagration at the facility is the result of sabotage.
There has been a number of ammunition depot explosions over the last 15 years in across Eastern Europe. 2 in Serbia, 6 in Bulgaria since 2000, Gerdec in Albania, Cobasna in Moldova, Ukraine itself in 2015. Cold War explosives are becoming unstable and they tend to explode on their own, especially when there is insufficient money to maintain proper storage.
If you look at it on Google Earth, you'll see that it's fairly spread out. There are a large number of separate warehouses (around 100?), and each warehouse has large earthen banks around it, then a large amount of empty space. That's intended to contain fire & explosions, so if something goes wrong you might lose a single warehouse but they don't spread to other parts of the complex. That's clearly not working very well. But those earthen banks and empty spaces take up a large amount of space, probably over 90% of the site.
So it's fairly spread out, even though it was at a single site.
People tend to object if you build an ammo bunker next to their house, so it's always going to be awkward to get more sites. You also need to secure ammo bunkers very well, so having less sites lets you have better security for the same money, or spend less to get the same level of security. Making a base 4 times bigger only doubles the perimeter fencing needed, probably doesn't change the number of guarded gates you need, and the number of guards needed only goes up a little bit since the guards are mostly there to man the gate and to react to an intruder. So having a small number of large sites does make sense.
While sabotage is possible, so is carelessness from a soldiers assigned to the depot. When I was in the Army I was a member of a team who did pre ARTEP OPFOR. Supply units were horrible, the worst of the back lines units. It's boring work for the soldiers, leading to massive complacency and struggles with morale. Medical units were much more alert, much busier, and tended to have much higher morale.
Considering many of these depots are not as well constructed or older, it only takes a small accident to have a big result.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
There has been a number of ammunition depot explosions over the last 15 years in across Eastern Europe. 2 in Serbia, 6 in Bulgaria since 2000, Gerdec in Albania, Cobasna in Moldova, Ukraine itself in 2015. Cold War explosives are becoming unstable and they tend to explode on their own, especially when there is insufficient money to maintain proper storage.
My father told me a story from the cold war, specifically the Nicaraguan civil war in the 70's. He was an officer in Somoza's army at the time. They found a cache of explosives and improvised bombs left behind by the rebels, and he and others were in charge of destroying them (a controlled explosion.) Alas, some pro-government reporters were demanding (yep, demanding) the troops to "re-arrange" the explosives to take better pictures.
My dad, as he told me, had a bad feeling about it (given how badly improvised explosives and old ammo could be) and left the site to report the anomaly. Just after walking a hundred yards or so, BOOM!. People without limbs, eyes popped like water balloons by the shock wave, flesh splatted everywhere.
Ammo and things that go kaput, you gotta respect that volatile shit.