Posted on 06/02/2010 11:29:20 AM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
BERLIN (AP) -- Three experts working to defuse a bomb from World War II were killed when the device exploded, injuring six others, police said Wednesday.
Some 7,000 residents from around the area in the central German town of Goettingen, where the 1100-pound (500-kilogram) heavy bomb was found, were still being evacuated when it blew up late Tuesday.
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Poor bomb defusers. Very sad.
Why would you even bother trying to diffuse a 65+ year old bomb.. clear the area and blow it up...
Prayers for their families.
WW II was 65 years ago. WW I was over 90 years ago. And they are still finding bombs??
Wow.
Bots. Word.
500 lb bomb does a LOT of damage to the surrounding area, and most of the time they can defuse them safely. There were some bombs made by both sides as traps for EOD personnel. They basically could not be defused and were designed to blow when the attempt was made. This might have been one of them.
Civil war ordinance is still lethal some guy got kill a year or so ago by a civil war shell explosion.
I was thinking the same thing, but it was probably too close to other buildings and infrastructure.
Roosevelt’s fault.
They find them all the time during construction in Germany, a couple thousand tons a year. We dropped millions of them, and in the fast WWII rebuilding they didn't necessarily bother to check for unexploded ordnance first.
They can haul off or defuse most bombs easily, but the big problem is when they find bombs with delay-action detonators. Those were basically chemically-triggered, air-dropped time bombs. For the ones that didn't go off, the detonators have degraded over the years, and those suckers are ready to blow if you breathe on them too hard.
I dunno, I work under the assumption stuff can be rebuilt... people can’t.
Ordinace that is 65+ years old, my gut just says evacuate the area and blow the mother up.
This may just not be practicle in europe because old ordinance is being found so frequently, but still, that’s where my mind goes.
No, Hoover's fault.
In the worst areas of France and Belgium where the artillery barrages continued for years, the farmers routinely plow their fields each spring, pick up the upturned shells and bombs, carry them to the side of the road, and the French demo experts drive around picking them up by the truckload.
Sobering work. As the shells age, they sometimes get less dangerous (certainly all rust, but seldom do they rust through!) but most get more dangerous as the explosives separate and react.
Hardly a year goes by that new construction in London, or Berlin or Dresden doesn’t turn up an unexploded bomb. I wonder why we never hear about unexploded ordinance in Japan?
“The bomb which went off in Goettingen is of a type containing a vial of acetone which bursts on impact and is meant to trickle down and dissolve a celluloid disk that keeps back the cocked firing pin that then ignites the TNT inside.”
Weren't incendiaries used more over Japan? Also, there was 4 more years of heavy bombing over Europe....Japan really didn't start getting clobbered until 44 or 45, I think. Plus WWI, plus - how many landmass invasions over the years?
But your point is still completely valid.
IIRC, this is the first time the diffusing EOD people have been killed doing this. They're doing something right. Normally you wrench it open, pop the fuse and you're good, no real danger to anyone (although civilians get evacuated for blocks). But with these delayed fuses they will blow in place if they think it's too unstable. Probably this time they misjudged how unstable it was.
I suspect there is a combination of several things:
Many tens of thousands (millions ?) of bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities, but only over a limited time frame and in limited (”hah!) areas over only a few limited number of the cities. (Compared to Germany vs the UK for example.)
But with many Japanese cities only hit limited times, even carpet bombing doesn’t spread them out too much.
We didn’t even get airports on the islands and B-52’s to carry them until late in the war. I suspect if you count the number of flights of bombers, there really aren’t many compared to the 6 years of much more indiscriminate air war over Europe
Most of our bombs were fairly small, fairly lightweight incendiary bombs over Japan. They would not bury themselves undereground when they land. So even duds, when exposed to a firestorm from nearby bombs or building, would themselves get cooked off.
A iron bomb could drop and impact and bury itself. Even another close bomb might not set it off.
Our bombs were fairly reliable by that time in the war.
Can't answer your question, but I suspect there are similar stories. Instead I can tell you a related story. In my former employment, we had Geophex (a geophysical exploration company) build us a detector for lost underground storage tanks. under a Small Business Innovative Research project. The instrument is essentially a very low frequency ground penetrating radar. One of the first surveys they conducted with it was to search for unexploded bombs for the Japanese at the former Tachikawa Air Base after we returned the land for the base in the 90s. I did not see the results & do not know if they found anything.
The nature of the physics involved is that it is much easier to find things in relatively open areas than it is in city landscapes with underground utilities, etc.
Geophex also used this instrumentation to do contract work for UNSCO(?) in Iraq in 1997-98 to successfully search for Sadaam's hidden proscribed materials. The system works well in the "pristine" areas there.
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