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Comment by BattyMilk | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of this stuff around! About 10yrs ago, my dad caused a lengthy shutdown of the channel tunnel after a piece of metal (he'd assumed it was a machine gun barrel) he picked up on the Somme battlefield was found in the boot of his car during a random search. It was a live WW1 mortar. They closed the tunnel and detonated it at the terminal.

As farmers work on the fields in northern France they regularly find artifacts from the war and just toss them aside as an annoyance.

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Assuming you're talking about the incident in 2005... My wife and I to got stuck at Waterloo station for hours waiting for a train to Paris while the authorities sorted things out... :-)

We were interviewed by a reporter from one of the red tops and they had to re-take our photo several times because we didn't look miserable enough.

> As farmers work on the fields in northern France they regularly find artifacts from the war and just toss them aside as an annoyance.

More exactly they put them on the side of the field and the military (eventually) hauls them off to sites so they can dispose of them.

Eh, that's the theory. The reality is more as the parent describes - they just get tossed. More often than not they'll dig a pit, drag the heap of ordnance out of the barn, dump it in, pour on petrol, strike a light and leg it. The more enterprising/brave/stupid ones strip, clean, and sell on eBay through German and Dutch middlemen.

The nuts thing is that quite often they're chemical weapons they do this with - but it's not much different to what the military do - but nobody wants a cordon sanitaire around a productive field, so DIY it is.

I know you’re right about how this is done, but my god I’d rather have that cordon than exposure to some horrific vesicant!

How are the stupidest of that bunch the ones that sell them, and not the ones lighting piles of unexploded ordinance on fire?

They are both stupid ideas, but I can't see how a farmer would live past maybe one or two of those burn piles.

I spend all my youth in the north of France. I have never heard of the behavior you describe. AFAIK, the rules are rather well applied and children are well informed to avoid accidents.

Children, totally - I lived in Alsace for about six months as a kid, and was repeatedly warned not to touch any weird looking objects in woods, fields, etc., not that it stopped me from ferreting around in old bunkers.

I've never seen it done, but I did meet a farmer with an impressive array of ordnance stacked in his grange, some of which he sold, the rest of which he said he burned in a deep hole. Sure, single data point, but he definitely held the "this is what we do" attitude. This would've been '93.

GP described pretty much what we did with that stuff in our childhood in USSR. Not that we weren't well informed about the rules :)

In the early days after world war 2 - working at the sugar refinery in my town was considered a suicide job. Many of the sugar beets had some mixend in ammonition with them, so there where days where the washing assembly or the hacking machine would blow up- sometimes killing people.

I am very surprised given how little machine gun barrels resemble a motar round!

Was your father prosecuted?

Edit: see stefanfisk comment, there is a surprising similarity between one type of wwi motar and wwi machine gun barrels.

He was, yes. He received a 9 month sentence suspended for 2yrs.

I am sorry to hear that. That must have been a terrible experience for him and you.

sometimes the similarities are not too far off http://www.westernfrontmilitaria.com/ourshop/prod_4018094--S...

For privacy's sake I won't link to the story, which is not hard to find since the Channel Tunnel doesn't get closed that often, particularly over bomb scares, and I will delete/edit this post if the poster wants, but wow:

    The bomb went undetected as he travelled back to the
    UK through the Tunnel but later, as he attempted to 
    return to France to show the device to a war expert 
    friend, he was stopped for a routine check.

Apparently a Stokes mortar. To be honest, with enough rust I probably wouldn't have recognised it as that either. But doesn't mean it's wise to transport that in your car.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stokes_mortar

while WW2 left a lot of munitions around that did not explode as well as some impressive architecture WW1 left its mark on France with Zone Rouge which was considered too costly and too dangerous to clean up. The issue in this case wasn't just explosive ordinance but chemical weapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge

wouldn't something like that be a good idea to test robots for different use cases? I.e. restoring landmarks by scanning/cleaning the area?

There are restricted woods in France still full of unexploded explosives from WW1[0]. It's a huge problem more or less all around Europe.

0. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-i/this-red-zone-i...

And fairly regularly French farmworkers are killed by ww1 shells - there is also a similar area near Berlin with a lot of unexploded ww2 ordinance

Oh, that's creepy - where is that area near Berlin? (Berliner here)

The eastern side where the main soviet attack came from in the battle of Berlin in 45 - there was massive bombardment a lot of which went into the ground and did not detonate.

An ever present problem, I believe Cambodia is one of the places with the largest amount of Unexploded Ordinance:

http://www.maginternational.org/what-we-do/where-we-work/mag...

Gare du Nord was in chaos once when we were coming back to London. Some idiot had tried to KNOWINGLY bring a live WWII grenade back as a souvenir.

If you don't know anything about ordinance, it's easy to assume to explosives go inert after 70+ years of lying dormant. "If it hasn't exploded in all this time, why would it go off now?"

That doesn't make any sense.

> "If it hasn't exploded in all this time, why would it go off now?"

This explains why someone might be (erroneously) confident that it won't spontaneously go off, but even if that was right, saying it hasn't spontaneously gone off doesn't tell you anything about what will happen if you instead activate the mechanism. Why would they conclude it's inert from the fact that it hasn't spontaneously gone off?

Even if their understanding of explosives is wrong, they must still understand that it's an offence to have these munitions?

Statistically, some percentage of the people will get it wrong. Instead of railing against them for being stupid, why not just accept that "people being wrong" is an inevitable natural phenomenon?

Most mechanisms break down and stop working after decades of sitting in a field with no maintenance. The fact that bombs might still work is surprising.

The actual bomb lasts way longer than the safeguard.

Also, picric acid was a popular filler for WWI shells, and picric acid tends to react with metal casings over to form picric acid salts, which are very shock/friction (and potentially vibration) sensitive.

Also, be careful of first aid kits from that era, as they sometimes used picric acid as an antiseptic on gauze, often in contact with a metal case...

You mean that old first aid kits might explode if disturbed?!

No need to panic, but yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picric_acid

> In the early 20th century, picric acid was stocked in pharmacies as an antiseptic and as a treatment for burns, malaria, herpes, and smallpox. Picric acid-soaked gauze was also commonly stocked in first aid kits from that period as a burn treatment.

On the slightly positive side, picric acid also sublimates, but I'm not sure how long it would take for evaporate from the first aid kit. On the other hand, sublimation also increases the surface area of any metal container for forming metallic picrates.

I’m not panicking, but wow. I did not expect to learn this sort of thing today. Amazing.

> https://www.google.be/search?q=machine+gun+barrel&safe=off&c...

How could he mistake a « piece of metal » with a machine gun barrel ?

A water-cooled Vickers or Spandau barrel with its cooling jacket is a similar diameter

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