Omega Owners Forum
Chat Area => General Discussion Area => Topic started by: Rods2 on 10 November 2013, 21:01:03
-
WWI munitions.
They are still finding and disposing of 100's of shells in the Ypres area every year. Of the 1 billion shells fired between the British and Germans, they reckon 300 million failed to detonate. Obviously, the gas ones are getting more dangerous with age as the cases rust away.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2497732/The-iron-harvest-Meet-soldiers-tasked-clearing-hundreds-tonnes-deadly-World-War-I-shells-mines-beneath-fields-Flanders.html (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2497732/The-iron-harvest-Meet-soldiers-tasked-clearing-hundreds-tonnes-deadly-World-War-I-shells-mines-beneath-fields-Flanders.html)
-
I visited the unit which deals with this task back in 2005 during my training in Sandhurst and it was fascinating. The mornings were spent patrolling the fields looking for new mounds of earth. The farmers upon finding a shell would carefully move it to the corner and cover it with earth. The afternoons were spent in '4 Romeo' (full CBRN suit, gasmask, overboots, the works) moving the shells from the containers in to the machine where they were detonated and the resulting gases would be filtered and the reside neutralised.
As cadets we would bitch at spending a couple of hours in '4 Romeo' (usually because some pleasant Colour Sgt would beast us while fully suited) let alone every afternoon. Looking in to the containers and seing the collected shells was also surreal, they were left open, outdoors but undercover that way if they leaked the gases would not collect in a room and overwhelm the occupants.
Truely, an eyeopener.
-
Rods, thanks for sharing.. I'm watching those world war 1-II related events/stories with special interest (starting from my very small child years)..
seems like you and I have some common interest :) and there may be other reasons we cant know now :-\
-
when i was a kid my gran told me she worked in a munitions factory-as a young girl-and one day 2 woman were arguing and as one walked away-the other woman threw something at her---there was a bang and it took the woman's head off-yet the body still walked a bit more--my gran ran out screaming--and she told me the womans hair would go yellow----don't know if she made those stories up or not---she passed away when i was 9yrs old---oh and she said about airships bombing london too
-
We go to the Picardy region of France (Somme) and the farmers just pile the shells up,on the side of the road,for disposal by bomb squad, but that's the French. also regularly hand grenades get found in the potato graders,.
can see it one day coming back through Calais,the xray machine going mad and a piece of ww1 being found, urm might cause more chaos than the illegals cause when they get found.
-
Another good and poignant find. Thanks. :y
-
Words fail me :-[. Thanks for sharing this. Without getting into a long controversial political debate - the 'Western World' lives in a pretty big glass house of it's own doesn't it. This is just horrifying on a scale I can't comprehend.
Lessons learnt and all that :-\ :-\ - we are still at war on a global scale, we still build weapons that we continue to use against ourselves (Humans) - except we got a lot smarter at it supposedly :-X
But that fact that I can sit here and write this is why we should never forget them.