Unexploded artillery round?
- Thread starter BUDFORCE
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Soldato
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They're going to hit it with a hammer aren't they
Quite ? It was pretty epic
It's been an issue since the beginning. The first high explosive was nitroglycerine...that spelling looks wrong...hmm...apparently it's right...which was very useful for mining and construction work but unreasonably dangerous to make, store, transport or use because it's too sensitive to various things including movement, vibration, trivial impacts...all manner of things. I vaguely recall an advert many years ago for a luxury car brand that showed a container with a tiny quantity of nitroglycerine attached to the top of the dashboard while the car was being driven on a smooth road. Proof positive that there was no vibration in the dashboard. Very striking to anyone who knows anything about nitroglycerine, so it was probably completely useless as an advert. The overlap between people who were in the market for a luxury car some decades ago and people who know anything about nitroglycerine must be very small indeed.
Anyway...I'm wandering off topic because I've drank half a bottle of beer not long after taking some codeine. Not a great plan. My head's in the shed. The pain's gone away though, which is nice.
So...yeah...explody stuff. Alfred (I think) Nobel was concerned about people being killed in accidents with nitroglycerine, so he set out to make it safer somehow and came up with the idea of mixing it (nitroglycerine is a liquid, so mixing it with other stuff is relatively simple) with an inert compound to make it much harder to detonate. Sawdust and powdered clay or some sort of dirt IIRC. It worked. He called it dynamite. He wasn't at all pleased by the fact that people promptly weaponised it. Which indirectly led to the establishment of the Nobel Prize - he had (unfairly IMO) become associated with explosive weapons and he didn't want that as his legacy.
Wandering back to the point...the issue you refer to applied right from the start, from dynamite. Over time and depending on environmental conditions, the nitroglycerine seperates from the inert compound. "sweating", it's called. Then it might explode if you touch it, step near it, bump into whatever it's stored on or in. Maybe if you sneeze near it. If dynamite looks wet, it's time to walk very softly away.
Some scientists created the most unstable explosive they could imagine, apparently out of curiosity. "Hey, this molecular structure would be ludicrously unstable...I wonder if we could make it?". So...azidoazideazide. All the nitrogen atoms in all the wrong bonds. Despite having the best experts and the best equipment for this sort of thing, they were unable to determine how sensitive it was because it was too sensitive to measure how sensitive it is. They were unable to build anything that would impact it with a small enough force to not set it off. A tiny probe moving at half a millimetre per hour? BANG! Dim light? BANG! Sometimes it exploded for no reason that anyone could determine. In a lead box on a shockproof table underground in absolute darkness in a controlled environment.
EDIT: I vaguely remembered an entertaining article from a chemist and was able to find it again:
https://corante.com/things-i-wont-work-with/things-i-wont-work-with-azidoazide-azides-more-or-less/
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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.
I used to live in the Medway towns. Some time in Gillingham, some time in Rainham. Far enough away for the ship to be irrelevant. If it had exploded, we might have heard it but no more than that.
I had no idea what it was when I was a kid and roaming around for fun. I used to go out onto the mudflats too. There were pipes that were exposed at low time (EDIT: tide) and you could walk along the top of them, way out into the mudflats. So I did, because they were there and I was a kid. I had no idea that the shoreline moves by kilometres in that location and I could have been drowned if I did it at the wrong time. Different times.
Yea they took it away to be safely disposed of.
It wouldn't have been impressive, just a very small "Phuuuuft" under a big stack of sand bags with more of the noise coming from the explosive the ATO will have used unless they went with a pig stick (water jet).
Oh yea they showed us that as well, the water gun thing, apparently 150 meter minimum safe distance for that, crazy when you think that it's just water.
Caporegime
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And here it is. I took this back in June 2019.
Went to go see it today having read about it in this thread. It's exactly as you'd expect, but somehow seeing it in the flesh is still quite fascinating. We also discovered there are boat tours which also do the forts so we'll book that next. I love seeing this kind of thing
Same tour out of Southend did the forts and the Richard Montgomery.We also discovered there are boat tours which also do the forts so we'll book that next. I love seeing this kind of thing
Caporegime
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Same tour out of Southend did the forts and the Richard Montgomery.
That's the one, my mum's coming over in October so we'll take her then. I'm always interested to learn about these things, sadly as a filthy job stealing immigrant I never know what to look for. Should probably do a thread.
What on earth is the pressure for a relatively small quantity of water to be that dangerous...
A quick look online indicates 80,000 psi. With abrasive material mixed in with the water. You could cut a tank in half with it.
It's designed to blast the bomb apart, thus destroying the integrity of the any triggering mechanism and it's ability to explode. It's going to be like a water cutter turned into a cannon.
Yeap, with the older versions of a "pig stick"/disruptor the water pressure was mainly there to push a plastic or non-conductive lump of material through an object (bomb casing, circuit boards, wiring etc) as fast as possible to disrupt the firing sequence before it gets going rather than just using the water itself as the cutting tool but it looks like thats changed now and it's purely water cutting.
Back when I worked with an EOD dude in the late 90's he showed me this triangular blade version based on the same idea for cutting into bigger objects but usually, if there were no safety issues about it's location (say something found a beach etc), they'd prefer to just cover it in sand bags then smeg it in place with a big old lump of their own plastic explosive instead.
Back when I worked with an EOD dude in the late 90's he showed me this triangular blade version based on the same idea for cutting into bigger objects but usually, if there were no safety issues about it's location (say something found a beach etc), they'd prefer to just cover it in sand bags then smeg it in place with a big old lump of their own plastic explosive instead.