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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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Holy shit. Other than the obvious, I never learned much in school about the Allied bombing campaign in Japan during WWII... which, now that I think about it, was probably on purpose.
This is going to be one of the horrors of Ukraine. A legacy of landmines that will not be cleared in most of our lifetimes, even if the war ended today.
Not the same as unexploded airdropped ordinance, but significantly worse.
They will have tractors that run on explosive charges I'm sure. The Ukrainians get ruzzian lemons and they've been making lemonade 🍋.
No amount of copium is going to clear those minefields, or save the coming generations Ukrainians, who will continue to be maimed and killed by these for the foreseeable future..
The only real hope, is that there is a significant technological development that that both dramatically expedites the complete mapping of minefields, and allows demining personel to rapidily destroy the ordinace, while being outside of the blast and shrapnel radius.
Not just mines, but sleeper drones with onboard AI that just sit there for decades due to an extra zero in a config variable before suddenly activating as if the war is still happening.
If this is a real and documented concern, please provide sources so I can take a look.
Otherwise, no, batteries will not hold a charge for decades. Landmines and unexploded ordinance are analog. They will last as long as the mechanisms and explosive payload aren't damaged, or corroded.
Not just in Japan, in Europe as well.
We're still finding random shit from all sides, IIRC there is a fully loaded German heavy bomber on the bottom of the lake near where I grew up
A few years ago, near where my family lived in New Jersey, there was a small newspaper article mentioning that construction on a set of mid-rise condominiums on the Delaware River was being notably delayed, with the vague implication that there was some trouble with financing or construction or something. [To be fair, both of these were true, but for very not-obvious reasons.] But then you start tracing back through the history of the site:
They had selected the site for the condos because it had been the site of a large flea market from the late 1970s to early 2000s, so all they'd have to do was dig up the parking lots, lay in utilities, and compact the soil to be ready to build. The flea market was there because it was the site of a massive drive-in movie theatre built in the early 1950s, so all they had had to do was put up some cheap buildings that were eventually condemned and torn down. The drive-in movie theatre was there because the land had already been cleared and flattened by the US government, so it was cheap to put in a parking lot and big screen.
Why had the government so kindly cleared and flattened the ground? Well, the site was right next to a small bridge across the Delaware; on the other side of the bridge was Frankford Arsenal, where they produced munitions during both World Wars. And they had to test the munitions, so they'd drive over the bridge and test them at this site in New Jersey. And it turns out that sometimes they were either high or lazy or careless or something, because sometimes they didn't bother driving across the bridge, they'd just shell New Jersey from across the river instead.
The shelling led to a bunch of unexploded ordinance being in extremely unexpected places, until it started showing up eighty years later, when the condo people actually started digging up the ground to lay in their utilities. Of course, the condo association was quietly and casually referencing vague construction delays, because if people knew it was a munitions testing site and they'd recently found a bunch of UXO, no one would buy the condos.
[Also, while trying to look up details for this comment, I discovered three other cases of UXO in New Jersey in the past couple years. This is all very weird to me.]
Strange, because the idea of shelling New Jersey seems very natural to the rest of us
And it turns out that sometimes they were either high or lazy or careless or something
No they were just normal people from Philly
They probably shelled it because they were testing the shells as fired from artillery or whatever.
Damn, I'm from Jersey, though Central, and this is all news to me. And I'm aware of the Frankfurt Armory explosion and all of that, but never did any research beyond. Very interesting.
It's the old Tacony-Palmyra Drive-In site. More fun facts: part of the area they're building on used to be a landfill for Philadelphia, which is still contaminated - they've just paved it over. Oh, and the condos they're building? They're being used to fulfill the town's low-income housing requirements (as required by Mount Laurel I and II). I'm sure the developers are being quite open with the residents that their lovely new buildings are on top of a munitions testing site and a landfill ... :(
I'm not familiar with the particular site, but having dealt with similar sites through my work, it's presumably under the management of an LSRP as to any sort of landfill.
So landfills are pretty common everywhere. Back in the 20s, up to the 50s, they didn't have trucks to take garbage out, and so there was just a lace in town where they dumped everything. It's becoming common that the contents of these sites are identified, any potential contaminants are remediated, and the rest of the stuff is basically capped. There are procedures in place to demarcate where the landfill begins, in the event someone has to dig in the future, and beyond that they put loads of soil, gravel, and then a blacktop cap over top (in some cases they will leave areas green). There are strict standards for residential, and once those are met, they're deemed safe. Very common these days. And the kind of fill in these old sites is garbage that was present in the first half of the century, and it's mainly just junk. As I said, LSRPs would identify any potentially hazardous materials and remediate them.
Now, as far as a munitions depot, I have not come across them in my work, and so that's new to me. That being said, the sites for these affordable housing projects under Mt. Laurel are chosen by the municipalities, and so it wasn't a developer coming and saying yeah, it's fine; it was the municipality saying so. They're also generally part of a settlement in court.
During the long process of determining eligible sites, they conduct what's called a Phase 1 environmental assessment, which identifies potential for contamination. So if there is potential, they'd move on to additional, more detailed studies. And, basically, if you're aware of the site's history, so are the folks involved in the project, and they've moved on to identifying potential contaminants and remediating it. For affordable projects, they'll presumably get grant monies, either federal or state, which will require they comply with whatever guidelines are appropriate. NJDEP have some of the strictest standards (because we have so much experience) in the country.
But yeah, munitions depot, or at least what was essentially a firing range, is absolutely new to me, and I really hope they get some kind of UXO robots in there before you have guys in heavy machinery moving through. And I'm sure they have, because the State and the municipality would essentially be on the hook, as far as liability.
Edit: I should add, planning board and council meetings with regard to the project are open to members of the public, and in some cases they're streamed online (one of the good things to come out of COVID). If you are interested, it's a great place to see some of the inner workings of all of this. The municipality isn't just stepping aside, they have their advocates, legal, engineering, and the like, and they'll do a thorough vetting. It's rare for affordable projects to get denied, but it does happen, and site safety can be a big factor.
I used to live in an area that was one of the biggest targets for bombers in Germany during WW2. I remember every few months there was a bomb alarm. We had to leave the house for a few hours while it was being defused. No bomb ever blew up luckily and it just became routine.
There's potentially up to a few kilotons worth of munitions (about half a hiroshima bomb) sitting right next to Kent (England) in a sunken liberty ship.
Is that the one in the Thames, or another one? I wouldn't be surprised if there are several around GB
Sounds like a good movie story line where aliens invade and we need older ordinances to fight them off and we have to go to this bomber to get them and win the fight
That's close to the original Space Battleship Yamato. By the time earthlings got FTL travel and super weapons, they ran out of proper shipyards and material. They did have enough to retrofit the sunken battleship Yamato from the underside(they already had underground cities to escape the orbital bombings).
Sounds a bit like worldwar series by Harry Turtledove
Does it still fly?
I would ask the corpses of the crew who are still down there, but I would guess they would have went home instead of dying in a foreign land if it still flew.
Wait til you hear about Cambodia...
And western Europe and the Middle East
They're referring to landmines, leftover from that region's wars of the mid-20th century: America's Vietnam & Cambodian war, French-Indochina war, Cambodian civil war, etc.
The legacy of landmines and chemical warfare is still regularly killing, maiming, and causes significant increases in fetal birth defects and other rare illnesses.
The Doolittle raids are fairly well know but the fire bombings carried out after that were not. The E-46 cluster bomb was pretty terrible 3 - 5 seconds after hitting the ground a small explosion would ignite and spread flaming napalm. The updraft from the fires was so bad some bombers lost control and crashed.
Japanese cities were primarily built using wood as it was better suited for their climate and earthquakes. The fire bombing of Tokyo with a single deadliest attack on the Japanese mainland, killing even more than either atomic bomb drop.
If you're interested in the worst of it you should look up firebombing and why it was so effective against Japan.
The one thing that Commodore Perry didn't trade them was copies of The Three Little Pigs.
/s
The best history of this is “the bomber mafia” by Malcolm Gladwell.
He really tells the whole complex story.
It may have got mentioned in passing in relation to the nukes, but most people only remember those.