WWII bomb kills excavator operator in Germany

[Schroeder]

8 more injured.
Sad story. Shows again how dangerous that stuff still is.
http://www.dw.de/one-killed-after-wo...any/a-17340011

[Admiral Halsey]

It's times like this that make me glad that neither the Enola Gay or Bockscar were shot down over Japan with the result the bombs got lost. Could you imagine what would happen today if one of them had been lost and suddenly went off?

The joys of excavating, you never know what you will find.
Sometimes its interesting, sometimes its annoying, other times its bloody dangerous.

[Jimbuna]

Tragic and even more worrying is the knowledge there are probably still thousands more out there somewhere.

Originally Posted by Admiral Halsey

It's times like this that make me glad that neither the Enola Gay or Bockscar were shot down over Japan with the result the bombs got lost. Could you imagine what would happen today if one of them had been lost and suddenly went off?

Nukes don't just "go off", but they might open up over time and release their pretty pretty rays of happiness...

[Catfish]

It's like with all those bombs ever dropped, like e.g. cluster bombs.
The only sure thing is (as a US general put it) that they reach the ground

Some bombs are especially 'smart', as they were designed to explode an hour or two later, so the firefighters and civilians trying to rebuild from the rubble would be killed after the raid. The 'blockbuster' bombs designed to collapse whole house blocks of cities dropped over Germany also were 'smart', some never exploded due to failure ('Blindgaenger')
And some bombs were designed to explode when trying to defuse them - some nice chapters in the 'english patient', about that.

B.t.w. there still are some nuclear missiles missing, that have been lost by submarines and planes, mostly including . And i do not want to know what the former soviet union 'lost' ..

[Admiral Halsey]

Originally Posted by Nippelspanner

Nukes don't just "go off", but they might open up over time and release their pretty pretty rays of happiness...

"Pretty rays of happiness"? First time i've ever heard it be put like that.

Originally Posted by Catfish

B.t.w. there still are some nuclear missiles missing, that have been lost by submarines and planes, mostly including . And i do not want to know what the former soviet union 'lost' ..

Isn't one of them near Savannah, GA?

[Wolferz]

That's unfortunate. There are still plenty of munitions of the unexploded variety left over from WW II. In land and sea.

[Oberon]

Sorry to hear about that incident, it's been a while since we've lost someone to a UXB incident over here, but in comparison...well, we did rather saturate Germany with the things...

[Betonov]

We have the added bonus of having a major WWI front in our country.

Collectors are our biggest problem though. They pick unexploded ordinance from the ground like a chicken does grain. Only this grain goes kabooom.

[August]

I understand that there are still areas of the WW1 front that contain persistent chemical weapons agents.

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by August

I understand that there are still areas of the WW1 front that contain persistent chemical weapons agents.

Yup, part of the Iron Harvest as it's called. Farmers will quite often uncover munitions, carefully put it to one side of the field and call out the specialist Belgium disposal unit to remove them.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...-Flanders.html

[XabbaRus]

Can't the family try and sue the British government? Everyone else in war zones of late does.

[Stealhead]

When I was stationed at Ramstein AB they found an unexploded 500 pound bomb near Kaiserslaugtern I think in what was an old rail road marshaling yard a prime target for bombers.I think it was not too far from the big Opel factory if I recall.A German EOD company found it so no one got hurt.If I recall they just blew it right there the land was being prepped for construction anyway.The entire city pretty much was leveled in 44/45 so they just built over top the rubble so older pre-war structures you stepped down into from the street.The main Catholic church still had a few scars on its bell tower.They had a pretty cool museum which had an old air raid bunker built into hill nothing too fancy though just dug out tunnels.

According to the German civilian that worked in our shop it was required by law in certain parts of Germany to have a company sweep any property before any major construction occurred.

Just think tough even if the failure rate is 5% for munitions even in a decent fire fight if say 50 artillery shells where expended that would be 2.5 UXOs. If you expended 500,000 shells with the same failure rate that would mean 25,000 UXOs.Even with only a 1 or 2 percent failure ratio with the amount of munitions used in a major conflict that is still many UXOs.

Of course many munitions in Germany especially later in the war where produced using slave labor workers who of course have a strong desire for sabotage so I bet the failure rate for German munitions late war was much higher around 10% perhaps heck the gyroscopes for the V2 the slave workers would urinate on them to cause rust they used pee instead of water because water caused rust too rapidly and would be spotted before final assembly.

Even the Allied labor force was not perfect so I'd say that their failure rate would have been in the 3 to 5 percent range.

Originally Posted by August

I understand that there are still areas of the WW1 front that contain persistent chemical weapons agents.

Not just the front. I was working on a munitions depot in the 80s when they unearthed dumped WWI shells, including phosgene.
On another job there was a little of that "pretty ray of happiness" where drums of Radium had been buried behind a factory because health issues over radiation poisoning meant they couldn't use it anymore.