American 500lbs bomb...

[Lusche]

...exploded yesterday in my hometown.
While doing some earthworking, an excavator fitted with an hydraulic breaker hit the bomb which instantly exploded. Amazingly the operator survived with minor wounds. 17 people were injured, pieces of the bomb were found up to 500m away. The industrial park where this happend had formerly been the Thyssen Henrichshütte steelworks, which was the reason Hattingen was heavily bombed several times.

Here is a slideshow with some pictures, but they are not very spectacular http://www.derwesten.de/nachrichten/nachrichten/2008/9/19/news-77813898/detail.html

[Toad]

Glad no one died! Amazing the operator got away OK.

[avionix]

These are routinely popping up all over.  Saw this article on Foxnews yesterday.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,423926,00.html

And, there is a neighborhood here in Florida that "just found out" it is sitting on top of a live fire range from WWII.  The Army Corps of Engineers had filed all the proper paperwork with the city, but, some idiot let the contractor build there. 

[MiloMorai]

RAF Scampton had a live Grand Slam bomb (22,000lb) as a gate guardian.

Apparently when Lincolnshire County Council were widening the road past RAF Scampton's main gate in about 1958, the 'gate guards' there had to be moved to make way for the new carriageway. Scampton was the WWII home of 617 Sqn, and said "gate guards" were a Lancaster...and a Grand Slam bomb.

When they went to lift the Grand Slam, thought for years to just be an empty casing, with an RAF 8 Ton Coles Crane, it wouldn't budge. "Oh, it must be filled with concrete" they said. Then somebody had a horrible thought .... No!..... Couldn't be? ... Not after all these years out here open to the public to climb over and be photographed sitting astride! .... Could it? .... Then everyone raced off to get the Station ARMO. He carefully scraped off many layers of paint and gingerly unscrewed the base plate.

Yes, you guessed it, live 1944 explosive filling! The beast was very gently lifted onto an RAF 'Queen Mary' low loader, using a much larger civvy crane (I often wonder what, if anything, they told the crane driver), then driven slowly under massive police escort to the coastal experimental range at Shoeburyness. There it was rigged for demolition, and when it 'high ordered', it proved in no uncertain terms to anyone within a ten mile radius that the filling was still very much alive!

Exhaustive investigations then took place, but nobody could find the long-gone 1944, 1945 or 1946 records which might have shown how a live 22,000 lb bomb became a gate guard for nearly the next decade and a half. Some safety distance calculations were done, however, about the effect of a Grand Slam detonating at ground level in the open. Apart from the entire RAF Station, most of the northern part of the City of Lincoln, including Lincoln Cathedral, which dates back to 1250, would have been flattened.

http://www.gunnies.pac.com.au/gallery/grand_slam.htm

[Rich46yo]

It still strikes me as strange to see current maps of a united Germany. It strikes me as strange to see Berlin as the capitol. There was a time when I didnt think such a thing was possible.

Im glad nobody was hurt bad.

[Angus]

Milo, that was a gem you brought there.
BTW, some torpex 1000lbr's were blown up near our Reykjavik a couple of years ago. They evacuated a whole street. Was quite a show.
I think they were anti-sub bombs lost off-board.
In Germany, they're all over. Wasn't there a 500lb'r found under the football stadium in Frankfurt like last year?

[Reschke]

I am surprised that no one got killed in that one. That is the good side of it. Now the bad side is that some liberal bellybutton AMERICAN ACLU lawyer will get his civil rights buddy in Germany to file a lawsuit against the US Government for the proliferation of unexploded ordinance during a war. The crazy thing is the fools will win the lawsuit and the USA will have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in reparations to families "still effected" by the emotional loss of loved ones who died while working for companies producing war material during WW2.

The good news is those hundreds of millions of dollars will only be worth about 50 Euros once we finally get around to paying it off.

[bongaroo]

I don't know about all that, but helping to pay to continue finding and defusing these things would be a good idea. 

I share the same opinion on land mines.  No need for such passive defensive systems in this day and age.  And they are still killing lots of innocents all over the world.

Crazy story about that huge "gate guard" bomb!  I wonder how many people have photos of themselves sitting on it.

[832725]

Glad the operator made it alove and hope he recovers soon, and that weird bout the bomb.

[AquaShrimp]

...exploded yesterday in my hometown.
While doing some earthworking, an excavator fitted with an hydraulic breaker hit the bomb which instantly exploded. Amazingly the operator survived with minor wounds. 17 people were injured, pieces of the bomb were found up to 500m away. The industrial park where this happend had formerly been the Thyssen Henrichshütte steelworks, which was the reason Hattingen was heavily bombed several times.

Here is a slideshow with some pictures, but they are not very spectacular http://www.derwesten.de/nachrichten/nachrichten/2008/9/19/news-77813898/detail.html

So I guess it was a delayed fuse bomb?

[MiloMorai]

Something like 20% of the bombs dropped by the USAAF in Europe were duds.

[Reschke]

I see no reason that any government should have to pay for searching for unexploded ordinance this far after WW2. Good lord if that was the case we would still have EOD units running around all over the various pacific islands and 1/3 or Europe looking for anything that might be able to hurt someone. There comes a point where you have to stop and just deal with the fact that someone might step on something one day and get maimed or killed as a result of something that happened that long ago. Then it just might serve as a reminder of what reason that bomb was dropped or the AP mine was placed there for.

[Reschke]

Something like 20% of the bombs dropped by the USAAF in Europe were duds.

Any idea on how many bombs might have been dropped during that time frame? My guess is certainly hundreds of thousands.

[Motherland]

So I guess it was a delayed fuse bomb?

[MiloMorai]

There are areas of France and Belgium that are off limits due to WW1 ordnance.