Unexploded artillery round?
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A munitions ship sank during WW2 just offshore from a place fairly close to where I lived as a kid. I used to cycle there quite often because in those days a 40 mile bike ride didn't seem all that much to me. The ship contained several thousand tonnes of high explosives, so if it went up it would be on a scale more commonly associated with nukes. It's still there because nobody has been able to come up with a way to dispose of it safely. It's probably inert now, but nobody knows for sure. And that's after 80 years in mud and silt and seawater.
I'm pretty sure the ship was the Montgomery. I remember that because of Scotty from Star Trek
Found it...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery
A munitions ship sank during WW2 just offshore from a place fairly close to where I lived as a kid. I used to cycle there quite often because in those days a 40 mile bike ride didn't seem all that much to me. The ship contained several thousand tonnes of high explosives, so if it went up it would be on a scale more commonly associated with nukes. It's still there because nobody has been able to come up with a way to dispose of it safely. It's probably inert now, but nobody knows for sure. And that's after 80 years in mud and silt and seawater.
I'm pretty sure the ship was the Montgomery. I remember that because of Scotty from Star Trek
Found it...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery
I seem to recall when visiting a friend who lived in Sheerness many years ago that if it exploded it would send a 2m high wave through the town with tsunami like power.
Been linked before but this is the kind of scale explosion if that thing went off https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJcDVbH5q3k
Munitions found in rivers and in things like ponds have gone off before...
IIRC there are tens of thousands of tons (if not hundreds of thousands) of old munitions that were thrown off the side of ships in the Irish sea that the experts are still extremely worried about because if one goes off it could start a chain reaction like a small nuke.
It's one of the reasons that the idea of a bridge between Ireland and England/Wales is considered impractical, as you'd have to be building it directly over the munitions dump and if you didn't set it off during construction there is no guarantee that it won't go off at random one day and at the moment if that happens you might lose a ferry and some fishing vessels but no major loss of life, if you build a bridge over it and it goes off you potentially lose thousands of people,
From memory there are several types of munitions that get far more actively unstable as they break down due to things like the stabilising agents degrading faster, or crystals of the explosives forming and if they impact each other it sets it off.
This is all a well known issues and one of the reasons the military have all sorts of rules and regulations about storage and disposal of munitions, as odd as it may sound the military really like their munitions to be inert until they need them to go off, but don't like it when they go off unexpectedly, say because something is older than it should be and hasn't been stored well and gets dropped or knocked.
I think this is especially true of a lot of older munitions that were developed before the "modern" stuff that started to be used around the end of the second world war.
IIRC the earliest real high explosive was Nitro-glycerine which was dangerous enough that jogging it could set it off, making it great fun and exciting to transport, you tended to either carry the components and mix them on site, or get someone disposable to do most of the work with it (in the US during the construction of the first railways that tended to be the likes of chinese labourers), later explosives had stabilisers included that tended to reduce the chance of that happening (IIRC TNT was one such), but the stabilisers have a tendency to break down or separate out leaving you with the original problem.
This sort of thing IIRC is common to most explosives until the likes of C4 and nearly led to the loss of a US navy aircraft carrier in Vietnam in part because when there was a fire caused by a faulty rocket it caused several large bombs to go off when they shouldn't (I think they were rated to survive such a fire for a while), from memory the bombs had been stored improperly and their explosive agent (Composition B?) actually became more explosive when it was deteriorating at the expense of it becoming far less stable.
As has been said there is also the issue of things like why didn't it go off, it could be a detonator that wasn't made very well or got stuck due to the angle of impact*, or a timing fuse and in some cases all it takes is a knock at the wrong angle and you suddenly have the bomb going off just as intended, but a few decades late.
Basically munitions that are decades old and have been stored improperly are frequently far more dangerous than something that's new but made exactly the same way, especially if it might have been meant to go off and had they safeties removed.
Or to put in another way.
You don't mess with what might be old munitions as often even the experts don't know quite how it's going to behave as there are so many variables. You might get away with using it as an anvil or shaper for metalwork for 20 years then one day it goes off when the cat rubs up against it.
*A really common problem with some bombs and torpedoes, in the case of torpedoes it meant that for much of their early involvement US subs were fairly useless at taking out shipping** as their normal torpedoes had an impact fuse that was at 90 degrees of travel (and thus impact if you got a perfect shot) and had never been tested (the production rate was extremely low so some genius decided not to waste them on testing), with the result that if it hit head on as was considered the ideal, the fuse would often jam, it wasn't until months and hundreds of failed hits that they realised (and admitted) what was happening and gave instructions to try and get glancing blows. The US's torpedo situation in the early stages of their involved in the war was an utter farce with multiple basic design flaws as they'd copied elements from earlier versions that barely worked and not considered the increased forces from things like a torpedo that was travelling something like 50% faster on impact.
I think they partially fixed it by improving the strength of a spring, the less said about the magnetic fuse the better except that IIRC it too wasn't tested very well and from memory is thought to have resulted in at least a few subs not making it home, the same with the gyro guidance. I think for a while the US torpedoes in WW2 were probably more of a danger to the firing sub than they were to the enemy.
**I was reading about it a few months back and apparently it wasn't unknown for a submarine to fire all it's torpedoes and only get one to go off, despite seeing them actively hitting the sides of the enemy ship, or in some cases due to a design flaw in the depth gauge that had it's opening for the pressure sensor where it tended to read low (so the torpedo corrected by going deeper) to going under the ship.
[edit]
Sorry just realised I went way off topic at the end there
(in part because when I read up on those torpedoes I couldn't believe the issues).
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I've seen some arguing about how high the tsunami would be. My guess is that the time of day would matter a lot - that area is very tidal so the amount of water around varies a lot depending on the tides. The wreck is only about 10 metres below the surface and only just offshore, so I think the shockwave would hit Sheerness more directly and maybe not so much on the tsunami side of things. It certainly wouldn't do Sheerness any good.
Another munitions ship blew up in the 1960s during a salvage attempt. It was a smaller load, far deeper and many times further from shore, but people still felt it. Equipment detected the explosion thousands of kilometres away. It was on a par with a fairly significant earthquake. I'm not surprised they left the Montgomery where it was. I'd have done the same thing. A couple of years ago I spoke with someone who was one of the people who dived down to assess the situation not long after the war. A coincidence - I don't even live near the place any more. The gist of their report was that leaving it there was probably safer than trying to make it safe. That situation doesn't seem to have changed.
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If i remember right they also had issues with their torpedo bombers. They had to drop them from a very low height and they wouldn't stay on target/ detonate. Again due to no testing. Crazy to think that something such as a torpedo could be mass produced and never tested.
That's why you dont mess with old explosives. Who knows what it is and what shoddy design it might have. So much failed to properly detonate which is all you really need to know about it's design to be concerned.
That's why you dont mess with old explosives. Who knows what it is and what shoddy design it might have. So much failed to properly detonate which is all you really need to know about it's design to be concerned.
No idea personally - I was just a kid at the time attended a wedding or something and one of the old boys who lived there was trying to impress/scare the kids with tales about it.
Soldato
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Not forgetting this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery
I do not envy the contractor who the DfT bring in to remove the masts.
I do not envy the contractor who the DfT bring in to remove the masts.
I think part of it was that at the time the "mass production" was really only a handful a week and they assumed that because the basic designs had more or less worked in the previous models they would work fine in the new improved ones.
So you had from memory an impact fuse that upon impact deformed before the spring could push the detonator into place, a magnetic fuse that didn't work in the operational theatres because the testing of that had been done in an area with a different magnetic field strength (and IIRC a fault that meant it could activate during launch), a timing system that would activate the magnetic fuse too early so it would detonate because the torpedo was still turning, a gyroscope for guidance that was unreliable and resulted in the torpedoes circling back on the sub, and the pressure gauge that was calibrated for static operation but was on the backside of the torpedo near the screw so it was in an area that had a lower pressure due to the way the water flowed over it thus typically leading to it running something like 10 feet too deep once it hit speed.
Oh and a design team that didn't believe there was any problem, and were actively incompetent in how the devices were used, apparently during one test after the many complaints a factory rep/designer who was sent to see why they were failing and oversee the usage didn't know how to set the fuses up correct but blamed the crew for the failings of the torpedo.
It didn't help that the one of the main guys who was in charge of the program that oversaw the design of them was the head of submarine operations when the US joined the war and actively ignored the issues blaming the crews.
From memory submarine crews were actively disabling the magnetic fuses at one point, despite orders from the admiral in charge of the fleet because it was the only way to get a decent chance of an impact setting it off.
IIRC part of the issue was that the budget for the torpedoes production was small, with a lot of delays as they didn't see the need for a large number in a hurry, and the actual production was being done by several small facilities at first so it wasn't even "mass production" it was more like hand building cars. Effectively they started the war with the subs but nowhere near enough capacity to arm them.
As I say those things were at the start of their use probably more dangerous to the American subs firing them, and I believe one sub captain very deliberately kept one of his torpedoes for the return home because every other one had failed to operate in one way or another and he wanted to have proof of the issue.
On the flip side, once they'd resolved the issues that torpedo design worked pretty well for something like 30 years, it just took a year or more of active warfare before anyone in a position to do anything listened to the failure reports and started fixing them.
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Soldato
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The RLC bomb disposal teams have small, portable x-ray units in their vans so they'll will know whether it's a viable explosive or not before carrying out any controlled detonation.
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Unlucky. These days you have to buy them dinner first, or at least a drink.
No bang today. Bang tomorrow. There's always a bang tomorrow. What? Look, somebody's got to have some damn perspective around here! Bang. Sooner or later. BANG!
Oooph!Guess you could go up and see if you can watch if they're doing a controlled explosion. You could stand ......and bang!
So walked up to the MOD, 2 guys there.
They said it was a training round so reasonably inert although there is still some charge in it, they are going to take it back and dispose of it properly.
The only reason they were still there this morning is the clutch on their van broke so they are waiting for it to be fixed. They opened the van and showed us the bomb robot very cool.
They said it was a training round so reasonably inert although there is still some charge in it, they are going to take it back and dispose of it properly.
The only reason they were still there this morning is the clutch on their van broke so they are waiting for it to be fixed. They opened the van and showed us the bomb robot very cool.
A munitions ship sank during WW2 just offshore from a place fairly close to where I lived as a kid. I used to cycle there quite often because in those days a 40 mile bike ride didn't seem all that much to me. The ship contained several thousand tonnes of high explosives, so if it went up it would be on a scale more commonly associated with nukes. It's still there because nobody has been able to come up with a way to dispose of it safely. It's probably inert now, but nobody knows for sure. And that's after 80 years in mud and silt and seawater.
I'm pretty sure the ship was the Montgomery. I remember that because of Scotty from Star Trek
Found it...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery
I don't live on Sheppey but in Medway (About 10 miles away) and local news likes to remind us of our impending oblivion every year like clockwork.
:/