Residents of Hiroshima, don't try this at home.

I hope the bomb squad's huge clanging balls don't set the thing off.

DarthBrooks: Sounds like it's caused quite a Führer furor.

Nice!

cman: This happened once when I was stationed in Germany. It was WWII ordinance. Ya think that they would have cleaned all that shiat out 60 years post war.

Not with the sheer amount of bombs dropped on Germany.

Sounds like one of the blockbuster bombs. 1.8kg is about 4000lbs, which makes me think it must be a "cookie".

/my dog has no nose

From another article, there's a possible 275 more of these bombs. And the bomb squad has a 3-1 record of defusing them.

This happens all the time in the town where I grew up. Anytime a construction site goes up you can already put the bomb squad on speed dial. The place got 90%ish wiped off the face of the earth in 1944, so it's no huge surprise all that ordnance is still lying about.

It always gets a little messed up when they find a bomb in the centre and have to evacuate the nearby Anne Frank school though.

The gift that keeps on giving....

Again?!?! Link (new window)

This isn't a repeat of last Tuesday, just an echo

Could've done with a tag. Also, it seems that when first reported it was a British bomb. Did someone find a 'Kilroy' chalked on it?

Also also; when are they going to lift the ordinance prohibiting these:



They tha' bomb.

WWHKS

walkerhound: Again?!?! Link (new window)

This isn't a repeat of last Tuesday, just an echo

Tuesday was still the planning stages. Defusal was today. Follow Up tag is sitting in the corner, fuming quietly.

Add that to the American 500 kg bomb that was defused in Karlsruhe earlier today.

stanhapsburg

Add that to the American 500 kg bomb that was defused in Karlsruhe earlier today.

At this rate there'll be no holiday fireworks. The war on Christmas continues.

Larva Lump: stanhapsburg

Add that to the American 500 kg bomb that was defused in Karlsruhe earlier today.

At this rate there'll be no holiday fireworks. The war on Christmas continues.

Don't worry there are still enough unexploded WWII bombs left. while the size of the one in the article might be not be common, the whole thing is far from rare.

It makes you sort of wonder how much of the current generation of ammunition will still be a problem decades from now and how future weapons will become problems later on. I guess it probably will not be as much of a problem since nowhere are there weapons used in the quality and quantity that they were in WWII, but I really hope that whoever is designing this stuff like smart mines nowadays at DARPA is giving some thought about relative failure rates and how to facilitate cleaning the malfunctioning ones decades down the road when the people you dropped them on are no longer your enemies.

Link

FTA: The 70 kilogram (155 pounds) of unknown origin was defused in 15 minures, the city said in a statement

I wonder if it was fresh minure.

cman: This happened once when I was stationed in Germany. It was WWII ordinance. Ya think that they would have cleaned all that shiat out 60 years post war.

Subby has "defuse" and "detonate" confused.

Trust me, they're different.

I think I've read somewhere that it will take six HUNDRED years to clear Europe of all the WW1 and 2 UXO.

A buh?!?

Reported conversation between German air traffic control and a British airline captain in the 1960s:

Frankfurt ground control (imagine a very officious German accent): BOAC von two three -- I did not gif you permission to use zat taxiway! Vy cannot you follow instructions? Haf you never been to Frankfurt before?

BOAC 123 (imagine a very proper British accent): why yes I did old boy. But that was in 1944 and I didn't land that time.

TheShavingofOccam123: No Catchy Nickname: Sounds like one of the blockbuster bombs. 1.8kg is about 4000lbs, which makes me think it must be a "cookie".

My guess is the AN-M56 bomb. 3200 pounds of HE.

I wish the articles would specify metric tons or US tons or fortnight tons or...

http://www.303rdbg.com/bombs.html

Nope, it's a "cookie", 4000 pounds or 1.8 metric tons. No Catchy Nickname had it right.

Pic of the beast with EOD doing theit thing.

Lucky it wasn't a 22,000lb Grand Slam earthquake bomb...

The RAF also put timers on some of their really big "blockbuster" bombs, to help deter the rescue and firefighting teams from getting out early and stopping the fires before they merged and turned into those city-wide conflagrations. They studied how big a bomb was needed to smash up the homes and make them burn easier; IIRC they found that a 4000 lb bomb was the best size to remove the roofs and tear up the insides of the homes, but they'd mix in some 2000 lb and 5000 lb bombs with the timer delays as well.

Optical Aleutian: Tuesday was still the planning stages. Defusal was today. Follow Up tag is sitting in the corner, fuming quietly.

I hope we get another follow up when they transport it to the scrap yard.

i can't believe there's so much unexploded ordinance in Germany. Americans haven't been able to make anything good for 70 years! No wonder all the manufacturing jobs have been leaving. We can't even break stuff correctly.

Optical Aleutian
It always gets a little messed up when they find a bomb in the centre and have to evacuate the nearby Anne Frank school though.

They have to triple-check that none of the girls is hiding in the building?

Dinodork
Pic of the beast with EOD doing theit thing.

Glad someone recognized the muddy thing.
I probably would have gone by with a "looks like some ship lost or dumped a barrel".

Then again, I've a history of not recognizing bombs.
CSB:
Playing in the shallow waters at one of the Havel (local river) beaches when I was a boy , I dropped ass-first into a wave and onto a WWII bomb and didn't recognize it. Didn't quite understand why my dad was waving and screaming at me like crazy not to move as I was about to throw that "broken ship's propeller" to see how big a splash it would make.

/ good thing the top of the bomb was missing and it didn't contain explosives, just mud and a little crab
// threw it into the bushes - too bad, now I think it would have made an awesome paper weight or bookend or something

Take that, you Nazi bastards!

/Hopefully my grandfather's B-17 dropped that one
/KIA Sept 1944

Bendal
The RAF also put timers on some of their really big "blockbuster" bombs, to help deter the rescue and firefighting teams from getting out early and stopping the fires before they merged and turned into those city-wide conflagrations.

From what I've read, (especially the acid-based) detonators on those bombs designed to kill the clean-up crews are a real pain in the ass nowadays since they were designed to be difficult to defuse.
Well, that, and in general that detonators are aging and getting increasingly brittle the more time passes, so it becomes more and more dangerous to defuse or just touch the old bombs.

Additional fun is allegedly provided by those undocumented self-made bombs and shells from when one side managed to snatch some of the enemy's ammunition and then moved on to macGyver some Russian detonator onto a German explosive or the other way around, forcing the bomb squad to figure out by themselves what the fark they're actually looking at.

Loki-L: I guess it probably will not be as much of a problem since nowhere are there weapons used in the quality and quantity that they were in WWII

Laos has a bone to pick with you. Over the course of nine years, the US dumped over two tons PER PERSON of the Laotian population on Laos. More than 580,000 sorties. Most heavily bombed country in the world, and a good place to wander around if you'd like to step on a cluster bomb. Germany got off light.

Isn't there a ground-penetrating radar that can help find unexploded bombs?

twfeline: Isn't there a ground-penetrating radar that can help find unexploded bombs?

Not really, it's rather dependent on the exact bit of earth you are trying to look at and in a lot of cases it doesn't penetrate more than an inch or two. This particular bomb was underwater, water and moist earth are not friends of radar. Water is like kryptonite to radar waves, even if it's just dampness in the earth.

Holy shiat, that's less than 300 yards down the hill from where I lived two years ago. You can almost see my former apartment in this picture here. The road going up the hill behind the two trees on the left is Seizstraße, which I would walk up to get home from the bus stop.

cman:

A real German? Fantastic! Now, maybe you can tell me, how big is Ausfahrt? I mean, its xbox huge, and it feels like all the exits on the Autobahn are reserved for this large place.



"Ausfahrt" is German for "Rome" , silly

Rusty Shackleford: Kar98: I think I've read somewhere that it will take six HUNDRED years to clear Europe of all the WW1 and 2 UXO.

A good acquaintance of mine, who is the UXO officer with a group that explores below-ground Great War tunnels and dugouts in Belgium and France, estimates that there is one piece of unexploded ordnance for every square foot of that part of Europe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF5we48YPYQ

It may be only a rifle round, or it could be a 16-inch shell. Or it could be the 20,000 pounds of ammonal that he and his group found and rendered safe under a busy road junction at the parking lot of the Vimy Ridge Memorial in 1996.

He's a retired Royal Engineer UXO officer with all his fingers



And, apparently, balls the size of Gibraltar.