Controlled detonation for WWII bomb found in Munich | Hacker News Reader

Controlled detonation for WWII bomb found in Munich

bbc.co.uk

14 pointsspdy11 comments

I might add that WW2 bombs are found every week somewhere in Germany. They're dug up when old buildings are demolished, when rails are repaired, sometimes children find them while playing in the woods. I don't understand the technology behind bomb disposal and consider it a small miracle that rarely anything ever happens. In fact, bomb defusings are so routine that they don't usually make it the national news.

(This one is noteworthy only because it had to be actually detonated, and in the process caused quite a bit of damage.)

Ditto for the UK :-(

Although one of the biggest known unexploded bombs is a US ship that was sunk in the Thames Estuary:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery

"According to a BBC news report in 1970,[9] it was determined that if the wreck of the SS Richard Montgomery exploded, it would throw a 1,000-foot-wide (300 m) column of water and debris nearly 10,000 feet (3,000 m) into the air and generate a wave 16 feet (5 m) high. Almost every window in Sheerness (pop. c20,000) would be broken and buildings would be damaged by the blast. However news reports in May 2012 (including one by BBC Kent) stated that the wave could be about 4 feet (1 m) high, which although lower than previous estimates would be enough to cause flooding in some coastal settlements."

Was on the radio news today. It seems a huge crowd was using this 'chance' to have a party with cocktails and beers, making this some kind of .. event.

Sounds like they were having a blast.

70 years later we're still paying the costs for WWII. Interesting that the best option was to detonate it in place, with all the damage that caused.

Better quality of the video (Original, CC): http://vimeo.com/48399328

As I understood they tried to mitigate the explosion by putting sandbags and straw bales around the bomb. The burning straw is what I guess you see at the top of the explosion/fire. The straw also caused surrounding roofs to catch fire. Not sure why they didn't think of this and used fire proof stuff.

Do old unexploded bombs ever just go off on their own, or do they always need a trigger? (Moving them, etc.)

Yes, they do. (Well, of course that something has to happen, but it doesn't have to be human-related interaction.)

http://www.viennatimes.at/news/General_News/2012-08-26/28744...

They rarely, if ever, go off on their own. Modern explosives (and WW2 era explosives qualify as quite modern) are pretty inert and safe to handle. The fuses and cases are designed to be robust and safe to abuse - after all, they have to be transported in rough conditions, thrown about in a hurry, mounted and dismounted. A fuse has to do a lot of things to get the main charge to detonate.

The main danger is that the fuse is damaged by rust and erosion, and not all fuses were designed to be fail-safe. Such a damaged fuse can then activate on being tampered or moved. But a burrowed, undiscovered bomb going off on its own, I don't think such a thing ever happened.

It does happen. For an extreme example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Messines#cite_note-83 (I could not find a better link)

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