War well over but big bombs still produce nasty surprises
HONG KONG: Wars come and wars go, but the bombs remain.
Police and explosive ordnance disposal technicians removed a 1000-pound (454-kilogram) bomb that failed to explode during World War II but that successfully brought traffic to a standstill on Wednesday in a bustling Hong Kong neighbourhood. It was the second bomb discovered in the area just this week.
Untold millions of explosives have been sown into the ground in just about every conflict since the American Civil War, lurking under the feet of the descendants of those who dropped bombs from airplanes, hurled cannonballs, buried land mines or fired artillery.
The particular bomb found in Hong Kong, a United States-made AN-M65, salted the earth in one of the Allied bombing campaigns against Japanese troops that occupied the region during the war.
Seven decades after it was dropped, the discovery of the bomb by a construction crew sparked a mass evacuation of as many as 4000 people as ordnance disposal experts worked to safely remove the bomb in a dirty, difficult and dangerous operation.
Leftover explosives constitute ‘‘an enormous problem’’ across the world, said Brian Castner, a former air force officer who wrote the books The Long Walk and All the Ways We Kill and Die after his two tours in Iraq.
‘‘The only way to solve one, bomb by bomb.’’
He said the scene played out in Hong Kong is a common one across Europe, Asia and even the US, where the Civil War was the first conflict in which explosive shells were widely used.
‘‘A lot of these places know it’s coming and have a procedure in place,’’ Castner said. it is one by
Bombs grow more unstable with age as chemical changes occur, and deterioration of the fuse means the most volatile explosives in the bomb are that much more sensitive if struck by, say, a piece of construction equipment. That makes older bombs often more dangerous, not less, as they age.
Given that instability, a method called controlled detonation – essentially blowing up the bomb with another explosive such as C-4 – is the preferred method for disposing of a bomb like this.
But Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places on Earth, making that a poor choice for a bomb designed to destroy buildings, Castner said.
Navy bomb technicians who removed a similar bomb in Guam estimated that the blast wave would extend a kilometre, with bomb fragments launched as far as 1.5km away.
Castner reviewed photos from the scene and concluded the technicians pierced the casing either with a blow torch or a small shaped charge, then burned out the explosives. The process took about 24 hours.
Civilians are often the unwitting bomb detectors for mines and duds left over from past conflicts. The advocacy and bomb-clearing organisation Mines Advisory Group estimates that explosive remnants kill or maim 18 people a day, many of them curious children on old battlefields in countries such as Vietnam and Colombia.
In Laos, regarded as the most heavily bombed country in history per capita, the US dropped 2 million tonnes of ordnance over nine years ending in 1973 – equal to a full payload dropped every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, according to the advocacy group Legacies of War.
In Vietnam, a collection of global nonprofit groups, the Vietnamese government and US groups have focused on removing cluster munition duds and other bombs that have killed 40,000 people. One Vietnamese official said it would take 300 years to remove every bomb.
In 2010, three German bomb technicians were killed defusing a World War II-era bomb found at a construction site, sending shrapnel hundreds of metres away. – Washington Post