They have to defuse a WW2 bomb in your city and nobody is really concerned because that happens from time to time.
WHAT #noteuropean
dude there’s entire fields in the west part of Belgium that just has a small “Watch out, mine field” on it, and sometimes farmers don’t know and put cows on it and they get blown up. Shit happens. #WW2
Happens because of WW1 (WW2 too but there’s less stuff left) in northern France too.
Almost walked on a non explosed pair of shells while looking for mushrooms.
I was born in a small town in south Hungary… they didn’t just find one WW2 bomb somewhere around the town… they found 1200 bombs right outside the town in 2014.
Yes, around 1200 German SD-1 fragmentation bombs… only found in 2014!
I love those radio announcements. This part of the city, along with this highway and also, all trains going through, are going to be shut down on Saturday afternoon because bomb.
And all anyone bitches about is the detour they’re forced to take because if it didn’t blow up the past 71 years, they could have waited another week to defuse it, couldn’t they? Eugh.
there’s a flood? oh hello forgotten WWII ammunition in large quantities you go take a walk in the forest? oh hey WWII mine! kids play football in a field? good thing they didn’t kick that mine they found. someone actually looks through the old metal parts in a salvage yard? anti-aircraft mines! tbh nobody usually makes a great fuss because it very rarely actually hurts someone. but yeah until now I was always like ‘lol another one’ and never thought about it much XD
There’s a roadblock in the middle of the city? Oh no worries it’s just a bomb. A whole block gets evacuated? Oh no worries. Bomb. #LifeinGermany
same in czech… we literally have closed forests where no one can go, because mines everywhere and lol, our neighbor was building water well on his garden last year and he is digging and digging and then he hits something solid, surprise it’s a wwii bomb…
Here’s one being detonated in Yorkshire in 2009 (from WW2)
French and Belgian farmers will be turning up the “Iron Harvest” from WW1 for decades to come. And sometimes, when the plough hits one of these, it doesn’t turn up, it blows up…
I added something about UXBs to a reblog last year, and it fits nicely into this post.
First there’s the (almost certainly apocryphal) story of a gate-guardian at RAF Station Scampton, a Lancaster bomber and empty casings for the two most impressive bombs it carried, a Tallboy (12,000lb / 5,500kg ) and a Grand Slam (22,000lb / 10,000kg ).
Here’s what a Grand Slam looks like with a human for scale (I think he may be the designer, Barnes Wallis).
According to the story, when the Scampton plane and bombs had to be moved away from the gate back in the late 1950s, it turned out that the Grand Slam wasn’t empty at all but still full of WW2-era high explosive, and had to be moved to a coastal area then safely blown up with a bang heard for 10 miles all round.
Yeah, right.
The usual safe-disarming procedure for a bomb, especially if it was never dropped so isn’t “live”, is to melt the explosive out with a steam-jet.
No bang, and as a bonus the casing stays intact and can go back outside the gate or to a museum. Blowing it up only happens when there’s no alternative.
Imagine what detonating something 40 times that size would have looked, sounded and felt like.
The incident would have got at least a line or two in the papers, but there aren’t any records at all – no film, no video, no newspaper clippings and, most suspicious of all, every version I’ve seen on the internet reads like a paraphrase of every other.
Unexploded bombs and shells are all over the place, no question about that, but the Grand Slam story is, IMO, pinch of salt time…
Apparently there’s one off the coast of North Carolina; it got dropped out of an airplane (?? why??) and never went off, but they never found it, either.
Note: Apparently Stray #1 from that article may have been found while someone was diving for sea cucumbers off the coast of Canada. Although at this point I am equally willing to believe it was just, you know, another misplaced nuclear weapon.
And Stray #8, according to this article, has some documentation indicating its plutonium core was actually with it, regardless of what the Air Force currently claims.
ETA:@petermorwood suggested this for further reading. Looks like the above are from the Broken Arrow incident list. For some reason, the AFB runway incident does not have a live link, but you can find a description under the list of military nuclear accidents page.
You might have heard that Berlin is currently battling wildfires in the forests around the city. It’s quite hard for firefighters to get in there because guess what was a great target for Allied bombing in WW2? Berlin. So every so often the fire reached a piece of unexploded ordnance and things become even more interesting.
Got a call saying we weren’t shooting that day because they’d found a bomb at the studio. I was terrified! Found out later it was this!
“This is the biggest unexploded bomb we have found in central London.”
I remember being on the canal in Belgium when I was a teenager, and seeing various warning signs on field margins of “It is ploughing time, if you see metal in the ground if might be an unexploded bomb, please don’t touch” in at least 3 languages.
Skorpio's Art 