60,000 Germans Evacuate While Officials Try To Defuse a WWII Bomb (abc.net.au) 154
More than 70 years ago the UK's Royal Air Force dropped an 1,100-pound bomb on Germany. They just found it. An anonymous reader quotes ABC:
Residents in two German cities are evacuating their homes as authorities prepare to dispose of World War II-era bombs found during construction work this week. About 21,000 people have been ordered to leave their homes and workplaces in the western city of Koblenz as a precaution before specialists attempt to defuse the 500-kilogram bomb on Saturday afternoon (local time). Among those moved to safety are prison inmates and hospital patients. Officials in the financial capital Frankfurt, meanwhile, are carrying out what is described as Germany's biggest evacuation. Frankfurt city officials have said more than 60,000 residents will have to leave their homes for at least 12 hours.
Failure to defuse the bomb could cause a big enough explosion to flatten a city block, a fire department official said. "This bomb has more than 1.4 tonnes of explosives," Frankfurt fire chief Reinhard Ries said. "It's not just fragments that are the problem, but also the pressure that it creates that would dismantle all the buildings in a 100-metre radius"... Police will ring every doorbell and use helicopters with heat-sensing cameras to make sure nobody is left behind before they start diffusing the bomb.
Reuters notes that every year Germany discovers more than 2,000 tons of live bombs and munitions, adding "In July, a kindergarten was evacuated after teachers discovered an unexploded World War Two bomb on a shelf among some toys."
Failure to defuse the bomb could cause a big enough explosion to flatten a city block, a fire department official said. "This bomb has more than 1.4 tonnes of explosives," Frankfurt fire chief Reinhard Ries said. "It's not just fragments that are the problem, but also the pressure that it creates that would dismantle all the buildings in a 100-metre radius"... Police will ring every doorbell and use helicopters with heat-sensing cameras to make sure nobody is left behind before they start diffusing the bomb.
Reuters notes that every year Germany discovers more than 2,000 tons of live bombs and munitions, adding "In July, a kindergarten was evacuated after teachers discovered an unexploded World War Two bomb on a shelf among some toys."
So what weight? (Score:1, Insightful)
is it a 500kg bomb or is it a 1400kg bomb... you cant have a 500kg bomb containing 1.4Tonnes of explosives...
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There are two bombs. One in each of two cities.
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/. is paradise compared to arstechnica. Try to argue for a point instead of posting emotional (and 100% wrong) crap? Downvoted to oblivion. Try to joke? Downvoted unless it is based on emotional and wrong crap. Post relevant information (_not_ skewed shit but scientific research done by real scientists in a non-biased way and accepted by the scientific community)? Downvote if it doesn't happen to support the groupthink.
Really /. is paradise compared to that shithole. Randomized the password for my long-time
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I second this. For a site with such comparatively classy articles, Ars seems to get the commentariat that Salon.com rejected.
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That's because ARS sold out ages ago. And when they started pushing the "subscriptor" stuff, people started believing that because they paid for it, it made them better then anyone else around.
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There are two bombs.
Are you sure about that, captain Picard?
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I heard on the TV about a blockbuster. That's 4,000lb, IIRC. A cookie is 8,000, unless it's the way round.
In either case it's pretty big. Only Lancasters could carry anything bigger (up to 20,000lb), and even then only with modification.
it's two bombs (Score:5, Informative)
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...a second 1.4 ton bomb in Frankfurt.
Someone put a bomb in someone's hotdog?!
Yes. But PETA already filed charges against the animal abuser.
Re: What?!? Hotdog?! (Score:2)
1,800 kg (Score:2)
There are two bombs, and TFA confuses them a bit. There's a 500 kg bomb in Koblenz, and a 1,800 kg aerial mine in Frankfurt. Which, obviously, is the one with 1.4 tonnes of explosives.
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you cant have a 500kg bomb containing 1.4Tonnes of explosives...
. . . the bomb used a WWII precursor of today's TARDIS technology.
There's always plenty of more room near the rear . . .
How long has it been since you've seen this? (Score:2)
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Yep, that's right.
Americans and English didn't think of that when dropping this shit.
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Rural Belgium has this same problem, but from WW I.
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We have the same problem here in Canada from WWI and WWII. There's large stretches outside of bombing ranges where they still find munitions and such. Then you run into problems in places where they had munitions factories, Ingersoll, Ontario had one for WWI and WWII. The town itself was also used in training for house-to-house searches, when they were training people for D-day. So every once and awhile, in the older parts of town people will find booby traps in the walls(non-functional) and so on, when
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During WW2 some elements of the UK government were keen on dropping mustard gas on Germany (the RAF was less keen due to handling issues), so it used to be in the UK up until the late 90s that every now and then a farmer on land that was once an airfield would turn up an dump of it.
Not really a surprise. You find nasty piles of heavy metal dumps all over the place here in southwestern ontario too, or tailings contamination because it was used as backfill in an area or other things. Not really much you can do in a lot of those cases, where I used to live in Woodstock was about 1km from 3 garbage dumps. 2 of which were less then 140m from one of the tributaries of the Thames River. House were built on them back in the 1960's and 70's, then came the problems with methane seeping, the
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I knew a guy who was in a bomb disposal unit in the Belgian army.
Apparently chemical ones are the worst. They have to identify what it is (not easy when the paint's fallen off and it's encrusted with a century's worth of rust), move it to a secure lab, then release the contents, in a sealed chamber, into a substance that will neutralize or absorb the poison.
If they don't find any more they might be finished in about 2030. But they keep digging them up...
The Germans have the nicest toys... (Score:4, Funny)
"In July, a kindergarten was evacuated after teachers discovered an unexploded World War Two bomb on a shelf among some toys."
When I was a kid in the 1970's California, we had to build our own pipe bombs.
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Who mods this shit up? It offers nothing at all to the story or discussion.
It's a joke. Buy a clue.
And saying he built pipe bombs in school?
Before we had computers in the schools, many boys were interested in blowing up shit. It could be bombs, rockets, engine blocks or frogs. When my father grew in Idaho during the 1940's, he had quarter sticks of dynamite to go fishing with. When I grew up in California during the 1970's , pipe bombs were popular in my neighborhood and my older brother smuggled fireworks across the US-Mexico border. If you buy too much fertilizer today, you're put on a government watch list as a potent
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We've seen this before... (Score:5, Funny)
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We used to have a TV series called "Danger - UXB", based on the soldiers who had to slowly and carefully remove doodlebugs that children had found on the street and taken up to their bedrooms.
Re: We've seen this before... (Score:1)
Doodlebug was the nickname for the pulse jet powered V1 flying bomb. They weren't easy to lift, let alone take up to the bedroom.
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The V1 (Doodlebug) had an 850 kg (1870 lb) warhead. A complete V1 weighed 2150 kg (4740 lb). No "children" are going to carry either object upstairs.
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Britain is not moving away from Germany, it wants to leave the EU. There are 26 more states beside Germany in the EU (not counting the UK).
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That's what happens when you upset the Brits. Keep it in mind during the Brexit negotiations: it happened when you Krauts became too uppity, it can happen again.
What'll happen - the British will drop more dud bombs? I suppose it could be a problem if you happen to be right underneath one as it falls...
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it happened when you Krauts became too uppity, it can happen again.
Well, you can try to give the Americans a call for help again, but I don't think that they will save you from the Krauts this time around.
They will be busy cleaning up after Harvey and building a Wall . . .
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Not to worry, we can afford to take 10 minutes out of our busy days to dust off the Germans again.
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Haha! "...diffusing the bomb." Get rid of it by spreading it in the air? Abruptly, or gradually?
Wordings like this come from the same clueless copy editors who order crowds to "disburse." See we have the UXB team spreading the bomb debris in the air, and the German townspeople responding by tossing money aloft.
Sincerely hope they *don't* diffuse it (Score:4, Insightful)
"Police will ring every doorbell and use helicopters with heat-sensing cameras to make sure nobody is left behind before they start diffusing the bomb."
I hope it is defused and not diffused
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Homeopathic bombs are stronger the more you diffuse them.
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"Police will ring every doorbell and use helicopters with heat-sensing cameras to make sure nobody is left behind before they start diffusing the bomb."
I hope it is defused and not diffused
One of the techniques if a UXB is too dangerous to move and can't safely be destroyed in-situ is to melt the explosive out with steam thus diffusing the contents. The Wikipedia page on Bomb disposal [wikipedia.org] calls this Trepanation.
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I'm hoping they don't get over-zealous.
Where I am staying at the moment is a couple of metres outside the exclusion zone, I have just heard the police ordering people to leave their houses but am assuming they don't mean this particular house.
Explosives (Score:1)
Re:Explosives (Score:5, Interesting)
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Back in the 80's after my grandfather passed away, they found old dynamite in the attic of his house.
Not sure how they got it out, but they didn't burn the house down.
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More likely it wasn't actually Dynamite. They said "dynamite", but given that they didn't need to do any real damage to the house getting it out I suspect it was something quite a bit more stable... some variant of TNT would be a more likely guess.
Either way, it's almost certainly not an approved storage method.
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A friend of mine from the Netherlands was going to visit his grandfather one day, only to find that the whole neighbourhood was cordoned off, evacuated, and the police and military bomb disposal teams in a hurry to get inside.
Turns out, his grandfather had been the quartermaster for the local resistance, and had a fair amount of stuff lying around in his cellar, such as a couple of anti-tank mines, some mortar shells, a whole lot of small arms ammunition etc.
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Sounds like a correct action.
Contrary to what Hollywood will train people to think, most high explosives (and many low explosives) will burn perfectly unconcernedly if not confined. To get them to detonate, you need to apply a shock wave with a propagation speed of some thousand-plus metres per second. You don't get that accidentally - you need a specially designed de
Bomb Type (Score:5, Informative)
The bomb is a British Blockbuster - so called because one could flatten an entire city block.The bombs are the origin of the term..
They were giant cylinders filled with explosive,with no streamling and no tailfins. When dropped they tumbled randomly through the air so there was no kind of accuracy with them. Dropping one on anything smaller than a city was pointless. Essentially they're weapons that were purpose-designed to be dropped on cities and to kill civilians.
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Area bombing civilians is immoral (Score:2, Insightful)
The practice is indefensible, regardless of what you think of the point of view of the people you are dropping the bombs on. What you are engaged in is justifying an immoral act by saying the other guy is worse. You're still immoral for defending the practice. Blowing up little children because their parents might be Nazis is bullshit and I hope that in your heart of hearts you know that.
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The practice is indefensible, regardless of what you think of the point of view of the people you are dropping the bombs on. What you are engaged in is justifying an immoral act by saying the other guy is worse. You're still immoral for defending the practice. Blowing up little children because their parents might be Nazis is bullshit and I hope that in your heart of hearts you know that.
You're viewing this through the modern lens, that's why you don't understand why the practice was and in some regards still defensible. WWI was supposed to be the "war to end all wars." WWII proved that premise wrong, when one side crossed the line and indiscriminately targeted civilians all bets came off the table. What you should be happy with is that in today's age of terrorism, despite that terrorists directly go after civilians that we simply don't level entire towns and cities like we used to. We
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What you should be happy with is that in today's age of terrorism, despite that terrorists directly go after civilians that we simply don't level entire towns and cities like we used to.
Any reduction in violence is a good thing, on this I think we broadly agree.
But, while I would like to agree with your 'reason for happiness' I find little cause for happiness. Some of the 'before and after pictures' in Syria are heartbreaking.
If you'd care to agree, instead, that while there has been a blessed reduction in (the number of) some 'atrocities', and that is a reason we should be less 'unhappy' about it, there is a very long way to go before we can claim to be happy with the situation. (?)
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This was a time of WAR, against an extremely aggressive and efficient enemy with advanced technology and very few limits to the lengths they will go to in order to win. You take *any* advantage you can in a war like this, and being ruthless is an advantage.
If you show any form of weakness to a ruthless enemy they will exploit it. If you show that you are unwilling to endanger the lives of kids, they will build schools inside their military bases to stop you bombing them.
Also keep in mind that membership of
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True conscientious objectors were excused from using weapons and killing people by the time of WW2, in service to enlightened countries such as the US, the UK, and Canada (not an exhaustive list). They usually still had to perform non-combatant service, often medics including unarmed front-line medics in extreme danger, and essential civilian services in support of the war.
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The effect of WWI reparations wasn't as severe as the Nazis claimed. In WWII, most of the international law pertaining to warfare was Hague conventions, not Geneva ones, and they didn't forbid bombing of cities. I don't believe anyone was prosecuted for city-bombing per se (there was a prosecution of a Luftwaffe officer for bombing a city that had been declared open).
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The idea was not to kill civilians, but to destroy their housing (in the full knowledge that that would kill civilians, of course). It turned out to be a lot less useful than many people thought it would be.
Early in the war, the RAF adopted night bombing because they couldn't get bombers through in the daytime, and for some time had trouble hitting something as small as a city. The USAAF developed long-range fighters and bombers bristling with heavy machine guns and managed to make it work, and even th
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I wonder why it didn't go off. Did it land in soft mud or something?
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Some were fitted with chemical timers, so they would go off later. This was for two reasons, from what I understand. First, these bombs were so big that 6,000' was the minimum altitude for bomb-drops, as the shockwave would damage the plane below that. Second, it was an area-denial method, as they either had to send in technicians to defuse them hopefully in time, or simply wait until they exploded before going in and picking up the pieces. Given the number of bombs and the potential for many to embed thems
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It's extremely difficult to keep track of where bombs fell...
Even if you keep records of all the targets, there were many bombs that fell short of their targets for various reasons.
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Generally there are one or two triggering mechanisms, impact and timer. If only a timer is used, it can be broken by impact. Some primitive impact mechanisms might not work if the bomb lands at a peculiar angle, I guess. Or, the triggering mechanism may have been defective from the time of manufacture.
Since the side using the bomb wants to be able to transport it safely, bombs are designed to be armed (the triggering mechanism enabled) shortly before use. Failure to arm the bomb could also prevent detonatio
Archeology is fun and educational! (Score:2)
I hope they don't diffuse the bomb! (Score:3)
Defusing it would be preferable.
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Diffuse? (Score:3)
"Police will ring every doorbell and use helicopters with heat-sensing cameras to make sure nobody is left behind before they start diffusing the bomb."
If they are not careful, they will indeed diffuse the bomb. I hope that they defuse it instead.
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This is a stupid question, but is there something you could do to scan for these? e.g. use something like a hand-held metal detector, but bigger?
You could always try a jackhammer.
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I think I saw a Bigs Bunny cartoon with a similar premise.
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If they had a way to detect explosives from the air, they would be flying planes looking for active terrorist cells rather than unexploded WW2 bombs...
They also wouldn't publicise the fact they had such technology, as it would cause those active terrorist cells to devise new ways to hide their explosives.
Doesn't look like that uncommon an event: (Score:5, Informative)
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
All 1800Kg unexploded Blockbusters so far:
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Seems like there's an important lesson here. When you start dropping bombs, you're not just killing the people you drop them on. You have to assume you'll also kill some random people who happen to live there a few decades from now. So think really carefully [youtube.com] before dropping bombs.
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They did work! These are just the ~10% that didn't. I think you might not fully grasp the horrors of the world wars.....
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Yes you can. Afair it was the Brits who analyzed the efficiency of carpet bombing, and found that it has strongly diminishing returns. Every two tons of explosives dropped on a city leads to one civilian casualty. So, statistically, those five large bombs would have caused a death toll of about five.
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It is the expected number for carpet bombing a city with WW2 technology. So, basically what happens when you drop several thousand tons of munitions on a city that expects air attacks.
In WW2, about 25000 tons of bombs were dropped on Frankfurt. The official number of casualties is just under 6000; if you generously double that number to account for errors in the statistics, you'll arrive at on
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Cities today are more densely populated, and the population is no longer prepared for being bombed (people no longer have bomb shelters in their back yards for example)... Plus the authorities today are being more cautious than truly necessary, whereas during a time of war they would have had other priorities.
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Yes. However, OP was wondering about the death toll had these bombs actually worked instead of ending up as duds. Had they worked, they would have exploded about seventy-five years ago along with many thousand tons of other munitions dropped on those cities, and, statistically, caused a death toll of 0.5/t.
Today, the rationale for large evacuations in these cases is that all the people evacuated would be in danger if the thing goes off. You can't really predict
American angle to the story (Score:2)