Posted on 10/27/2011 4:44:47 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
BERLIN (BNO NEWS) -- German authorities on Thursday evacuated more than 20,000 people after an unexploded World War II bomb was discovered in the city of Halle, officials said.
The unexploded 500-kilogram (1,100-pound) wartime bomb was discovered by a man digging a ditch. At least 20,000 people, including all 500 patients at a local hospital, were forced to evacuate the area, the German dpa news agency reported.
Local police chief Bernd Wiegand said everyone within a radius of 800 meters (0.5 mile) was ordered to evacuate. Six schools and the city's hospital had to close as a result.
(Excerpt) Read more at wireupdate.com ...
I can fart harder than that.
They should be glad it's not a Grand Slam.
Those were observed to penetrate 14 feet of reinforced concrete.
Yes. Exactly so. My uncle drills large irrigation wells. Uses TNT to break hard rock formations in the shaft.
We were bouncing around one night in the other uncles hay field, ya know, getting us some meat, and I'm having trouble trying to keep my rifle from jabbing a hole through the windshield. Finally I ask him "Can I stick this case of beer under my feet in back?" He says "That's a case of dynamite. Best leave it right there..."
Bad weather, navigation error, jettisoning due to battle damage. Earlier bomb sights didn't have the accuracy of the Norden Bombsight. As good as the Norden sight was, something about being shot at can still mess up the bombadiers aim.
When over Germany, bombers had orders that even if the target was totally socked in with cloud cover, they were to drop their bombs anywhere over Germany.
bump.
> There are MILLIONS of tons of unexploded ordinance from WW I and II in Europe and all over Asia.
In 1970 I was in Vietnam. We were on top of a small mountain in Vung Tau. At the end of our watch, five of us were driving down to our barracks when our vehicle broke down about at the half way point. While two of the guys who fancier themselves motorheads, fixed the vehicle the rest of us watched. We discovered, not 15 feet off the road and complete hidden with overgrowth, a WW2 Japanese bunker, complete with Japanese rifles, a rotting box of potato masher grenades and a rotting box of mortar rounds. EOD was there the next day getting rid of it. At that time it was 25 years after WW2.
Thank you both for more fascinating information. Agree w the ‘special breed’ assessment. They were amazing. Doogle, thanks especially for the link; I can’t wait to check it out.
‘He says “That’s a case of dynamite. Best leave it right there...”’
What a story—I laughed and laughed. Thanks for sharing!
Even if it did not explode, there is still 1,100 pounds of high expolsives in the corrosive casing.
Not something you want people shaking and rocking in your back yard.
What makes TNT such a useful military explosive is that you can drop it, let it get hot, and bang it around, and it WON'T explode unless its detonator goes off.
BUT, let it age, especially if stored in a warm environment, and it becomes more sensitive to shock. Dynamite is even more touchy as it ages -- it exudes nitroglycerin.
Negative. Dynamite ‘sweats’ nitroglycerine since it is made with nitro suspended in clay. TNT does not contain nitro, it is a rock hard solid material that is extremely stable. 40+ year shelf life, and then it only loses burn rate as it ages.
I live in a little bitty neighborhood west of Austin that made gunpowder for confederate rifles out of bat guano from a massive cave up the road. The cover story for how our tiny town got on the map is we were milling corn and wheat for local farmers.
I’ve visited the Verdun battlefield. The are large areas around the battlefield where the trees and shrubs are stunted because there is so much iron in the soil.
No problem. There are so many more stories.
Carl thinks I don’t know anything about real freedom. My family are generally financially not that well to do. Colonists. Homesteaders. So we do just what we want. What we have to to get by. What I see are a ton of people out there sucking off the government tit and thinking they earned that. But they are still just sucking.
I guess we will hear how it turns out!
And they can’t spell aluminum. ;’)
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