Hacker News Reader

Comment by EliRivers | Hacker News Reader

On a related note, shells fired during WWI are still killing people today. Hell of a thing, to fire a weapon and kill someone a hundred years later.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26654314

View on HN

The most recent casualty of the U.S. Civil War lived to see Obama voted into office. He is unlikely to be the last.

UXO is a hell of a thing.

The last Civil War veteran died in 1956; the last to have seen combat died in 1953.

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

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

And the last Revolutionary War veteran died in 1866. (The year after our Civil War ended, in case you don't know much American history.)

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

They're talking about unexploded ordnance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexploded_ordinance

I don't know if there's a more recent example of Civil War UXO causing injuries, but here's a news article about a man killed in February 2008: http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/05/02/virginia-man-killed-...

That is the incident I was thinking of, although I seem to have misremembered the date of it.

And I was providing context.

Not terribly uncommon. Landmines and the like are still scattered all around many parts of the planet. And, just a few years ago near where I live in CA, a train exploded due to long buried WW2 munitions (a train had derailed at some point in a rainstorm and a great number of warheads got buried in the mud).

And WWII aerial photographs are still used to find unexploded weapons: http://ncap.org.uk/case-studies/explosive-ordnance-disposal Quite something to take a photograph 70 years ago that saves a life today.

This is a fairly common thing. Parts of Tegal airport were dug up recently to detonate unexploded ordinance, its found fairly frequently in Germany.

It happens in the US too, occasionally. The campus of my alma mater, along with a good chunk of the surrounding neighborhood, was taken over by the U.S. Army during both World Wars and used as an artillery range and, during World War I, a chemical weapons development center. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_American_University)

As a result, even up to the mid-1990s, when I was there, it was not unusual to see a block or two closed off periodically because someone digging had found unexploded ordnance there. And due to the chemical weapons work, these discoveries were more disconcerting than usual, because who knew if it was just a standard high-explosive shell or something loaded with mustard gas, or worse?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com