If anyone wants an education in why "slowly burning the explosive" isn't as mad an approach to disarming a bomb as it sounds, please do see the incredibly well informed responses I was rewarded with when I raised a quizzical eye to the technique in my post below.
Unfortunately the best replies were usurped by a telling off from someone who comically misread my tenor, and now the whole thread has been moved from top straight to bottom, presumably as the victim of some anti-controversy algorithm. I know it's not the done thing to comment on such matters, but there's some really great posts in there that people put a lot of effort into, and now they're buried, which, dang, is a shame.
I was also surprised the first time I heard you can safely burn explosives: I was reading some comments on the Vietnam war from veterans talking about how they used to heat their meals by burning pieces of C4.
I mean, the fumes are super not good since there will be a significant amount of N20, but most explosives are very hard to set off. Sure, it's relatively easy to create chemicals that explode, but the real trick is finding ones that don't explode from the slightest bump. For example, Alfred Nobel didn't invent nitroglycerin, he invented a safe(er) way to store and transport it. TNT is actually relatively difficult to set off, even something like shooting it with a rifle won't necessarily set it off. That being said, explosives definitely can sensitize with age, which is why unexploded ordinance is so hazardous.
For reference, my father was an explosives engineer and was the point of contact for local law enforcement when they found old explosives. (this was the 90s,so they didn't have funding for a bomb disposal team and this was an area that had mining history). There were multiple buildings where he advised the safest way to deal with the old explosives (mostly dynamite, but some TNT) was to set an explosive charge near and set them off since handling them would have been too high risk. New dynamite is safe enough you could toss it onto a campfire and it won't do anything more dramatic than burn rapidly (EDIT: not a guarantee, it is potentially possible that a fire could set dynamite off so I wouldn't recommend this, but anyone who can purchase it has an explosives license and hopefully knows better), but once it has aged enough it could potentially be set off by poking it with a stick. More modern explosives like TNT don't break down quite as dramatically, and in certain conditions TNT can even be rendered inert, but given unknown environmental factors any improperly stored explosives should be treated as potentially ready to go off if they are poked gently. That said, dad definitely did dispose of the majority of the old explosives simply by burning them, sometimes in place with the fire department on site if they couldn't be safely moved. The only buildings he had to set off the old explosives in were outbuildings in remote areas, where they had been left alone for a very long time. One of the structures, he was able to see a date stamp of 1918 on the wooden crate of dynamite leaking raw nitroglycerin.
Wild, that they’re still finding these almost 70 years later. There used to be a British series about finding unexploded bombs that was shown on PBS in the 80s or 90s called Danger: UXB about the teams that would defuse the unexploded bombs that would be found in England.
Here in Germany, all kinds of unexploded crap from WW2 is quite routinely found, and not just during building/renovations.
I heard in one documentary following the defusing/safe detonation of one of these that the "KBD" (one of the shorthands for the civilian ordinance disposal services) is estimated to have to work in this field for at least several decades considering the (potential) amount of explosives still hidden in the ground and water. Especially the water is another hot topic since after WW2 the Allies just dumped huge amounts of explosive ordinance and chemical weapons into the North and Baltic Seas which are slowly corroding under the water and releasing their toxic innards into the ecosystem(s).
A bunch of people employed by the ordinance disposal service have died doing their work over the years (relevant portion cited):
"Despite a professional and extremely cautious approach, deadly accidents caused by uncontrolled explosions occur time and again when defusing bombs. In the years 2000 to 2010, eight explosive ordnance clearance personnel were killed in action, [11] three of them alone in the detonation of a 500 kg Allied bomb on June 2, 2010 in Göttingen." -- https://de-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Kampfmittelr%...
In the part of my city that I live in, they find, on average, about one bomb per year that necessitates an evacuation so it can be defused. Usually, these are found during construction work.
There is forest not far away from my parents home (central Poland) where people were constantly finding unexploded bombs. Finally, in 2012 a team was hired to clean it. It took them 9 months and they found "tens of thousands" of missiles, bombs, munitions etc.
If you are into First World War memorabilia sometimes you don't even need metal detector to find shrapnel balls in local forests if you know where to look.
Makes one wonder how much of it has found its way into illicit hands. Yes, it's more dangerous to the owner than to any target at this point, but if you know what you're doing it could be a source of explosives that is otherwise completely untraceable.
I stayed in Verdun for a couple of nights on a trip through France last year. I explored the forest a bit, and noticed there are two kinds of rocks on the ground: White, chalky ones and brown ones. The brown ones are fragments of artillery shells.
It's a reasonably regular thing here in France. It's the sort of thing they'll find anytime there's a new building going up with underground parking beneath it - the contractor digs, finds a bomb, the army cordons off the quartier for a few hours and sorts it out. Makes the local news but mainly because it either obstructs traffic or is close to a school that needs to shut for the morning.
What does this mean ? Someone is operating a backhoe and there is a loud KLUNK and the operator looks at what it hit and says to him/herself jeez I'm lucky to still be alive ?
Parts of northeastern France are still off limits because of stuff left over from the First World War. Official estimates are that, at the current rate of clean-up, it will take somewhere between 300 and 700 years to clear the area completely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge
My German town of 70000 inhabitants has a WW2 bomb evacuation roughly every 4 years, in my experience.
Many hundred to a few thousand people have to leave their houses, police and other emergency services from the whole state come into town, the whole day or evening is full of sirens.
The local paper is running articles about the two or three bomb specialists as if they were old friends you haven't seen for a while.
Also when you're building the permit explicitly states that anything found that looks like munitions must be left alone and the town's crisis center be informed immediately. Around here (but that's because the area was heavily bombed) they routinely check aerial photos before issuing the permit. They even ask old people who lived around here if they remember bombs falling around the plot that's about to be built on.
In Ypres, Belgium, there are still unexploded shells from the first world war being unearthed. Those are now more than 100 years old. Farmers there know not to plough certain areas of their land.
It's so common there that you just leave your unexploded munitions at your gate for a pick-up.
From Wikipedia ..
> In Belgium, Dovo, the country's bomb disposal unit, recovers between 150 and 200 tons of unexploded bombs each year. Over 20 members of the unit have been killed since it was formed in 1919
Many more of the public (farmers typically) have been killed due to the "iron harvest"
It’s relatively common in the UK. According to this BBC article[0] the Ministry of Defence deal with about 60 a year. There was one washed up on the beach last month in Brighton near me[1].
It’s very common in Germany. August last year, Berlins disposal site caught fire with 25 tons of not disposed ammunition on the site. In winter, they blow up old ammunition every week - they stop for the summer due to fire hazard.
It was about 50 yards from my bedroom window when I was at university 20 years ago. Wierd to think what could be sat in the field opposite my house right now.
Bombing wasn't all that accurate back then. No GPS- or laser-guided ammunition was available yet. Missiles were quite experimental still and mostly used by fighter-bombers. Night bombing adds its own difficulties. Also, both sides had to deal with enemy air defense that was quite state of the art, therefore they could rarely take their leisure time to target well.
I'm in datacenter business and I'm managing couple of facilities around EMEA.
German (Frankfurt and Berlin) sites are notorious for sending out warnings that WW2 bombs were found in vicinity and defuse plans.
Having hundreds of kilos heavy bombs near data centers makes my nerves tense.
And I can only imagine how many are still to be found
It's not all that strange, a bomb that does not go off will bury itself deep in the terrain, you need to go looking for them somewhere between 8 and 12 meters deep!
The expectations are that for the areas in NL where there was a lot of bombing that it will take another 125 years before they'll be able to declare the job done.
Think about what this means for Ukraine where shells from both sides all land on Ukraine soil. The current front line is going to be a disaster area for decades.
In Germany WW2 bombs continue to go off at a rate of 1/year. We have to thank the Lord Lindemann and Bomber Harris for that - the two promoted the frankly idiotic idea of carpet bombing cities instead of armament factories, hoping that the population would overthrow Hitler. That at least was the official line.
What these two war criminals did was mix delayed fuze explosive bombs in with the regular incendiary and explosive load. The idea was to kill firefighters and interfere with the firefighting effort after a bombing run. Some of these delayed fuzes worked too well and instead of 4 hours after release they go off after 70 or 80 years.
> What these two war criminals did was mix delayed fuze explosive bombs in with the regular incendiary and explosive load
Even more hardcore than this, it was a common practice (e.g. it was done at Dresden) to do a second bomb run a couple of hours after the initial one, to hit the first responders. Of course none of that shit meaningfully impacted the duration of the war.
Funnily the Russians are doing the same now in Ukraine. People never learn, do they?
We still have several a year involving sudden neighborhood evacuations in the Nuremberg area, and I expect my son, age 2, will still be dealing with this when he’s an old man if he stays anywhere in Germany.
It’s especially chaotic when one is found close enough to stop traffic to and from the main train station, which is also a nexus for the subways.
I remember a WW1 naval mine being washed up on the beach we went to when I was a child, and being evacuated away into the town centre. Sort of leaves a memorable event when your 'day at the beach' is ruined like that.
It was mid-70s, so Danger:UXB was still a couple of years away.
Few years ago, in a town not far from Venice, digging a new road underpass, they found a completely unknown underground warehouse filled with nazi arms.
That was quite exceptional, but still nowadays WW2 bombs are found all over Italy, millions were dropped.
Great series. Towards the end they were showing the early experiments with steaming high explosive from bombs too risky to move. I guess this “burn the explosive out” method is the current evolution of that.
They had to dredge Portsmouth Harbour to accommodate the new QE2-class aircraft carriers.
Almost every week it seemed work had to stop and the area evacuated because they kept pulling up unexploded ordnance, Portsmouth being the home of the Navy and therefore very heavily bombed during WW2.
I loved that show when I was a kid. There is a ropey version floating around on the ocean waiting for a curious buccaneer to pick up. It still holds up.
Ever been to Sheerness? they reckon it'll do two million pounds worth...
...of improvements.
Seriously though, they more than know and check, it's carefully marked with large conspicuous buoys as well as constantly monitored in case someone fiddles with it and there are some pretty big, fast police RIBs round there. (had a nice friendly chat with them when they wondered if I was a drug smuggler.) Apparently they're cutting off the rusting masts (above water) sometime soon to reduce risk further. But there is not much that sensibly can be done to actually remove it, and there may not be much of it left that can actually go up.
Buried bombs that nobody knows are there are far more worrying... and the Germans have that problem rather worse than Britain does.
It still happens from time to time in Germany. To my knowledge the last fatality was an operator of an excavator in 2014.[1] It is disturbing that one can still become a victim of WW2 in a certain sense.
The piece of shrapnel the size of a bus that lands on the road gives you a sense of the scale and is horrifying. At first I was like "they let someone drive by that site while diffusing?!?
I think that was part of the containment around it. The bomb itself is an SC250, which is less than 2m long. But it definitely gives an idea of the power of the explosion it caused.
I'm assuming you mean American Civil War... and I wouldn't rush to call it done, some of those sieges involved a lot of big ammunition and there might be more out there. Impressive it was dry enough to go up, though, gunpowder soaks up moisture fairly enthusiastically.
Readit News
Unfortunately the best replies were usurped by a telling off from someone who comically misread my tenor, and now the whole thread has been moved from top straight to bottom, presumably as the victim of some anti-controversy algorithm. I know it's not the done thing to comment on such matters, but there's some really great posts in there that people put a lot of effort into, and now they're buried, which, dang, is a shame.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34755399
For reference, my father was an explosives engineer and was the point of contact for local law enforcement when they found old explosives. (this was the 90s,so they didn't have funding for a bomb disposal team and this was an area that had mining history). There were multiple buildings where he advised the safest way to deal with the old explosives (mostly dynamite, but some TNT) was to set an explosive charge near and set them off since handling them would have been too high risk. New dynamite is safe enough you could toss it onto a campfire and it won't do anything more dramatic than burn rapidly (EDIT: not a guarantee, it is potentially possible that a fire could set dynamite off so I wouldn't recommend this, but anyone who can purchase it has an explosives license and hopefully knows better), but once it has aged enough it could potentially be set off by poking it with a stick. More modern explosives like TNT don't break down quite as dramatically, and in certain conditions TNT can even be rendered inert, but given unknown environmental factors any improperly stored explosives should be treated as potentially ready to go off if they are poked gently. That said, dad definitely did dispose of the majority of the old explosives simply by burning them, sometimes in place with the fire department on site if they couldn't be safely moved. The only buildings he had to set off the old explosives in were outbuildings in remote areas, where they had been left alone for a very long time. One of the structures, he was able to see a date stamp of 1918 on the wooden crate of dynamite leaking raw nitroglycerin.
Dead Comment
I heard in one documentary following the defusing/safe detonation of one of these that the "KBD" (one of the shorthands for the civilian ordinance disposal services) is estimated to have to work in this field for at least several decades considering the (potential) amount of explosives still hidden in the ground and water. Especially the water is another hot topic since after WW2 the Allies just dumped huge amounts of explosive ordinance and chemical weapons into the North and Baltic Seas which are slowly corroding under the water and releasing their toxic innards into the ecosystem(s).
A bunch of people employed by the ordinance disposal service have died doing their work over the years (relevant portion cited):
"Despite a professional and extremely cautious approach, deadly accidents caused by uncontrolled explosions occur time and again when defusing bombs. In the years 2000 to 2010, eight explosive ordnance clearance personnel were killed in action, [11] three of them alone in the detonation of a 500 kg Allied bomb on June 2, 2010 in Göttingen." -- https://de-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Kampfmittelr%...
https://dzienniklodzki.pl/tony-bomb-i-pociskow-z-ii-wojny-sw...
If you are into First World War memorabilia sometimes you don't even need metal detector to find shrapnel balls in local forests if you know where to look.
What does this mean ? Someone is operating a backhoe and there is a loud KLUNK and the operator looks at what it hit and says to him/herself jeez I'm lucky to still be alive ?
Many hundred to a few thousand people have to leave their houses, police and other emergency services from the whole state come into town, the whole day or evening is full of sirens.
The local paper is running articles about the two or three bomb specialists as if they were old friends you haven't seen for a while.
Also when you're building the permit explicitly states that anything found that looks like munitions must be left alone and the town's crisis center be informed immediately. Around here (but that's because the area was heavily bombed) they routinely check aerial photos before issuing the permit. They even ask old people who lived around here if they remember bombs falling around the plot that's about to be built on.
I think the most recent fatalities because of those bombs occurred in 2014: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26654314
From Wikipedia ..
> In Belgium, Dovo, the country's bomb disposal unit, recovers between 150 and 200 tons of unexploded bombs each year. Over 20 members of the unit have been killed since it was formed in 1919
Many more of the public (farmers typically) have been killed due to the "iron harvest"
[0] What do we know about unexploded WW2 bombs? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-56243750
[1] https://www.brightonandhovenews.org/2023/01/02/suspected-bom...
Also photos of bomb drops are used to check where bombs might have fallen and not explode.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/firm-uses-hist...
It was about 50 yards from my bedroom window when I was at university 20 years ago. Wierd to think what could be sat in the field opposite my house right now.
The expectations are that for the areas in NL where there was a lot of bombing that it will take another 125 years before they'll be able to declare the job done.
It's pretty devastating to think that we're still dealing with the fallout of WWI a hundred years later.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/two-women-injur...
What these two war criminals did was mix delayed fuze explosive bombs in with the regular incendiary and explosive load. The idea was to kill firefighters and interfere with the firefighting effort after a bombing run. Some of these delayed fuzes worked too well and instead of 4 hours after release they go off after 70 or 80 years.
Even more hardcore than this, it was a common practice (e.g. it was done at Dresden) to do a second bomb run a couple of hours after the initial one, to hit the first responders. Of course none of that shit meaningfully impacted the duration of the war.
Funnily the Russians are doing the same now in Ukraine. People never learn, do they?
It’s especially chaotic when one is found close enough to stop traffic to and from the main train station, which is also a nexus for the subways.
It was mid-70s, so Danger:UXB was still a couple of years away.
Almost every week it seemed work had to stop and the area evacuated because they kept pulling up unexploded ordnance, Portsmouth being the home of the Navy and therefore very heavily bombed during WW2.
"While the risk of a major explosion is believed to be remote, it is considered prudent to monitor the condition of the wreck."
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-ss-richard-mo...
At least they know about it and check the site now and again...
...of improvements.
Seriously though, they more than know and check, it's carefully marked with large conspicuous buoys as well as constantly monitored in case someone fiddles with it and there are some pretty big, fast police RIBs round there. (had a nice friendly chat with them when they wondered if I was a drug smuggler.) Apparently they're cutting off the rusting masts (above water) sometime soon to reduce risk further. But there is not much that sensibly can be done to actually remove it, and there may not be much of it left that can actually go up.
Buried bombs that nobody knows are there are far more worrying... and the Germans have that problem rather worse than Britain does.
I mean if you were a drug smuggler you wouldn't have told them, would you?
"Oi mate, what you got that there? And no lies!"
"Evenin officer, just 200 kilos of cocaine, nothing fancy."
"Aight crackin, carry on. Wait, you got a loicense fer that cocaine?!"
It still happens from time to time in Germany. To my knowledge the last fatality was an operator of an excavator in 2014.[1] It is disturbing that one can still become a victim of WW2 in a certain sense.
[1] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/unfall-baggerfahrer-bei-bombe... (in German)
Deleted Comment
https://twitter.com/NorfolkPolice/status/1624133384069959682