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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

One was found in my city this week. Another one a few weeks ago. They're surprisingly common.

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.

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.

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 think it would be more cost and time-effective to just make explosives than go around searching for them, hoping they don't blow up when you dig them out, then concealing them and bringing them back to wherever your base of operations is. Explosives are (somewhat) easy to make, it is setting them off reliably without blowing yourself up that is difficult.

There was a scare with TriAcetone-TriPeroxide in shoes a few years ago; I think this is why we are still taking off our shoes.

Modern solutions make the safety aspect quite simple, exhibiting stability until hypersonic shockwave conditions.

A munition with a fuse is nothing terrorists etc would want. There's no way to know when it would explode, nor any way to control it.

I’d imagine most people with the knowledge to safely handle these types of explosives already have access to modern weapons grade stuff (black market munitions, etc.). For your run of the mill domestic terrorist type it really isn’t that hard to make explosives (fertilizer and diesel fuel), so probably not worth the risk of messing with unstable 100 year old bombs.

It has actually happened: in 1992 the italian judge Paolo Borsellino was killed in a car bombing organized by the mafia.

The explosive was sourced from unexploded bombs recovered in the Mediterranean sea.

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.

There are Red Zones in France that are deemed unsuitable for human habitation since WWI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge

> the contractor digs, finds a bomb

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 ?

Yes. I think it’s more dangerous for farmers, though. They have weaker machinery. Also, in parts of Belgium and France, it’s so common to find stuff that they carry small explosives, including mustard gas grenades from World War One, to the side of the road for later pickup by bomb disposal experts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest)

I guess it is something like that, but don't know for sure. I live in a major urban area so if they find an unexploded bomb it has probably been built over a couple of times since it was originally dropped. The most recent near me (about 800 meters away) was in 2021 and the most interesting thing about it for me was that it was a US bomb, not a German one.

http://www.uniindia.com/news/world/people-france-wwii/233733...

Pretty much, although in that case they would indeed be very lucky to not set it off. I guess it is more likely that they find it when they put down the soil they just excavated. I would like to be educated about this, but I feel they should pretty much expect these things and check with a metal detector before excavating the next layer of ground.

I'm sure it happens, sometimes.

Most of the time, the lawsuits for digging up someone's fiber optic cable or natgas line are so staggering that there are various "free" one-call services that mark buried objects. The public utilities all pool resources to fund it, so it's free in the sense that your utility bills pay for it. I know a guy who had a gig doing that and in addition to locate devices that are kind of like a giant telco wire toner, they do indeed sometimes walk around with a literal metal detector. Doesn't work very well on terracotta sewer pipe but those generally collapse in a couple decades as I've found out the hard way.

Anyway, yeah, a dude with a metal detector walking around with a map of buried pipes in one hand saying "that's odd there's not supposed to be a pipe here"...

Most bombs are found by actively surveying the site, often using old aerial photography. But random finds happen and sometimes with deadly consequences. In 2014 a bomb exploded during earth works, the backhoe operator was killed https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/unfall-baggerfahrer-bei-bombe...

For Belgian / Flemish farmers, yes.

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.

I think the most recent fatalities because of those bombs occurred in 2014: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26654314

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].

[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...

In Germany it is mandatory to do a bomb search on a plot before you are allowed to start building a building.

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’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.

There was one about a year ago.

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 believe the CEP (Circular Error Probable - the area near the aiming point the bomb was likely to hit with a 50% probability) was something like 5 miles for night-time high-altitude bombing during WW2.

A cursory search of WW2 airplanes, I am finding plenty of bombers that could operate at 500+mph (probably not when fully laden, but still). Targeting anything when going at that speed by little more than eye is still hugely impressive.

They had a full blown analogue targeting computer. The Norden bombsight was revolutionary [1].

Sadly it was still not accurate enough to hit specific buildings reliably so it didn’t have the impact on the war its designers expected.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden_bombsight

They had bomb sights of various complexities, the Norden being the best known US design:

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

Still very difficult.

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.

Yes, this is already well known and it is a complete disaster in the making. Also: the Russians leave the territory they evacuate heavily mined.

This war will have a very long aftermath.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/almost-one-third-ukrain...

It depends, shells won't go nearly as deep as a heavy aircraft bomb. And most of the Netherlands terrain is dry swamp. I don't think the same applies for other terrain types especially with a heavy rock layer.

So I don't think it'll be quite as bad. Mines on the other hand would be a worse problem there.

The fact that they don't go as deep makes it a different problem, not one that is less bad per-se. Aircraft bombs that sit 10 meters or more underground take an effort to reach, but that also means that they are relatively safe until you go looking for them. Unexploded artillery shells are shallow enough that regular work such as agriculture will turn them up and that means that lots of farmers will be at risk of their lives for a long time to come without an effort to clear their fields. Mines are extremely bad because they are usually hard to detect depending on what they are made of and can be set off by even the lightest vehicles (and even pedestrians).

Here's a chilling reminder of the first world war, https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-forbidden-forest/

It's pretty devastating to think that we're still dealing with the fallout of WWI a hundred years later.

The problem of dumped munitions in the Baltic is compounded by it being a good place to find amber, which looks quite similar to white phosphorus:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/two-women-injur...

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?

Its standard practice with insurgents and paramilitaries like FARC and the CIA drone squads in the oughties. One strike to hurt people and light fires, another a few minutes later to kill the first responders.

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.

In france farmers are finding them all the time. This will be a big problem for Ukrainian farmers into the future.

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