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The bomb caused runway damage and cancelled 80 flights. Thankfully it did not hurt anyone. //
Blackwing1 | October 2, 2024 at 2:36 pm
I so much want to insert a clip from “Falling Hare” where Bugs Bunny meets the Gremlin, who is pounding the nose of a bomb with a giant sledgehammer, and tells him, “To make these block-buster bombs go off, you have to hit them JUUUUUST right.” //
Hodge in reply to scooterjay. | October 2, 2024 at 3:06 pm
Nice math but you are way under-estimating just how many bombs were dropped during the War.
“World War II ended more than 79 years ago. But remnants of the intense airstrikes across Japan keep surfacing occasionally. The Self-Defense Forces reported that during the fiscal year 2023 alone, they disposed of 2,348 bombs, weighing a total of 41 tons.”
TargaGTS in reply to Joe-dallas. | October 2, 2024 at 1:38 pm
The wife and I went sailing around Denmark & Germany (through the Kiel Canal) in 2019. We tied up next to a weird looking Danish navy ship. So, I introduced myself to one of the sailors and asked what kind of ship it was. It was a bomb disposal ship. It’s outfitted with MADs (like what we use to detect subs underwater) and specialty sonar and it spends the year looking for unexploded WWII ordnance…and finds a LOT of it every year. They’ve even found WWI mustard gas shells. They apparently have similar land-based units that do the same thing. The ground is so soft in that part of Europe (probably not unlike where that airport sits), that these 500-lb would simply bury themselves meters-deep into the soil and sit there until some unsuspecting farmer or developer hit it with machinery. //
Hodge in reply to Joe-dallas. | October 2, 2024 at 2:52 pm
“Quite a few” is quite an understatement –
The zone rouge (English: red zone) is a chain of non-contiguous areas throughout northeastern France that the French government isolated after the First World War.
The zone rouge was defined just after the war as “Completely devastated. Damage to properties: 100%. Damage to Agriculture: 100%. Impossible to clean. Human life impossible”.
Each year, numerous unexploded shells are recovered from former WWI battlefields in what is known as the iron harvest. According to the Sécurité Civile, the French agency in charge of the land management of Zone Rouge, 300 to 700 more years at this current rate will be needed to clean the area completely. Some experiments conducted in 2005–06 discovered up to 300 shells per hectare (120 per acre) in the top 15 centimeters (5.9 inches) of soil in the worst areas.
