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#1
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WW2 British bomb found in Koblenz causes 45000 people evacuation
...the biggest since WW2!
http://www.thelocal.de/national/20111130-39193.html probably a 4000 lbs cookie, apparently the Rhine is giving back a lot of these bad boys lately! |
#2
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A 1 mile blast radius? Really?
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#3
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oh yes, 4000 lbs ain't no lightweight, it's the same weight of an average car.
I'm sure you've seen this before, and this is "just" an SC500 bomb http://howbigreally.com/dimension/wo...blast#mk12_5hn Last edited by Sternjaeger II; 11-30-2011 at 12:35 PM. |
#4
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One step frwd in understanding what means "carpet bombing"
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#5
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Still a threat after all this time,wow. Do you now if there has been any cases of ww2 ordnance actually going off? I know land mines are still a problem in some parts of the world but most of those are quite modern aren't they?
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#6
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Quote:
My brother is an archaeologist, he knows of my interest for WW1 and WW2 and called me on a couple of occasions asking me if I could help him identifying some suspect items his team stumbled upon whilst digging in the countryside near Anzio: whenever they go check on freshly ploughed fields there's SO much stuff coming up! Once they saw a little wooden box half buried, with what seemed like a fuse sticking out, he took a pic of it and texted it to me, I called him and said "stay well off that!! It's not a wooden box, it's a mine!!". I sent him the same day via express courier a manual with pics of the most commonly found landmines and ordnance of WW2, which he now keeps with himself all the time. In a month they found two Schu-minen 42, 5 Teller and loads of ammunition in 40 acres of land!! an interesting read on the topic can be found here http://maic.jmu.edu/journal/4.2/features/ww2/ww2.htm Last edited by Sternjaeger II; 11-30-2011 at 02:58 PM. |
#7
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Its scary to think of all the unexploded munitions lying around. I saw a programme about a French bomb dispoal team a while ago, and I think they said they had enough work to last the next several hundred years!
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#8
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Quote:
When I was still in Italy I remember they found a 1000lb US bomb on the station I used to take my train to uni every day: the bomb was literally 10 metres under the platform I used to walk back and forth on everyday waiting for my train (!!!). |
#9
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btw, "blast radius" doesn't mean that everything within a mile will be destroyed! That's the theoretical reachout of splinters and shockwave, but obstacles like building or terrain will deflect/modify it.
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#10
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The "total destruction" radius is - afaik - about 100m, at 1800m glass windows will still be broken. The rule by thumb is, when the defuse a bomb, 1m for every kg, so they evacuate 1800m for the 1800kg of that bomb.
The special situation in Koblenz is that the bomb is in the river - and the slopes of the river valley are all covered with houses right to the tops. Therefore the bomb is figuratively in the center of a funnel, so no "obstacles like building or terrain [that] will deflect/modify it". I've seen it last Saturday from a balcony right above it - being there on a visit. The probability is *really* low, but still they are *really* nervous... |
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