Morning Open Thread is an open discussion forum for human interest news of the day, hobby and fun things, what you did on your vacation, and your local weather phenomena.
Sometimes the unanswered question of the day has no answer. Or maybe the answer has no good question. This is one of those.
Typical Liberty Ship – photo Creative Commons via Wikimedia
Liberty Ships were 441-foot-long cargo vessels built during WW2 in sixteen shipyards around the US. 2,710 of them were built. One of the remarkable things about Liberty Ships is they were built in 24 days from laying of the keel to launch. They carried all kinds of supplies, including troops. Each one was named for a deceased prominent American.
The SS Richard Montgomery was one such Liberty Ship. It was loaded with 1,400 tons of bombs and explosives for the US Army Air Corps in England. Nearing its destination, it was steaming up an estuary of the River Thames when it ran aground near the town of Sheerness, just a few miles from London. Subsequent to grounding, the ship broke half in two under the massive weight of its cargo. Naturally, the two halves sank, just the tops of the ship’s masts visible above water.
Now what?
Let’s not forget those 1,400 tons of high explosive bombs on board.
The wreck of the SS Richard Montgomery has become a combination of tourist attraction and a place to avoid like the plague. If all those munitions were to be disturbed in just the right way, it would be one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever seen. Would the water tamp the blast, should it go off? No one knows. What’s more, no one wants to find out.
Video reporter-blogger Tom Scott has the story from the scene. You can see the masts sticking up out of the water behind him. Mr. Scott is in good humor, but I seem to detect an air of, “Let’s get this story done and get the hell out of here.”
Question is, should there be a salvage operation or not? If so, who would be willing to volunteer–and at what pay scale?
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Nicole Plyler Fisk
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Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
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Flowers For Socrates 
Hey, is that a real grenade? I don’t know, pull the pin and let’s find out.
The damage that a random detonation would cause is too great. Pick a date, have everyone clear out of the area and secure what can’t be moved. Set charges and free fish and chips for the week.
If it suddenly went off in the middle of the night with ships nearby would be a real disaster.
Morning all. I like your tweak to the format, Chuck. Looking good!!!
I’m with Pete on this – evacuate and blow the thing up.
Pete,
You could catch the free fish in rain barrels and on tarps.
“Hey Chauncey, it is raining fish!”
Its a very good question because there is insufficient data to make an informed decision. There are two reasonable courses of action:
1. Do nothing and hope the seawater eventually corrodes the detonators into inertness.
2. Remove a few of the most accessible bombs and at a safe site, destructively test the detonators. If they have corroded into passivity, there is nothing to worry about. If the detonators still can still ignite the explosives, a 2nd plan is needed.
I don’t think that a planned detonation is the best idea. Given the unknown risks, the question is how far to evacuate? What will happen given that the ship’s remains are under uncompressable water (I’d imagine that it would be much more dangerous to other shipping but less to to life and property on land). Would a planned detonation get all the bombs or would it throw some of them elsewhere?
David,
One reason they have not followed that course of action is the fear of any jostling or movement triggering a chain-fire type of incident. That’s why is caused such a furor when some kids boated out and touched the mast sticking out of the water. Ordinarily innocent enough, but no one knows if the wreck has a hair trigger that might set it off. The original cargo was about six thousand tons, and they got as much out as they could soon after the ship went aground. They left about 1,500 tons behind when the hull broke in half. Salvage operations stopped immediately. Simply put, no one knew how sensitive the fuses might be, with the consequences of a mistake being so incredibly catastrophic.
If it did go off, the shock wave would do more damage than the explosion itself. A good case in point is the video of a controlled detonation of the first stage booster for a Trident missile. The booster weighs 38,000 pounds. Note the shock wave moving outward at the speed of sound. The wave front of that shock wave is compressed into an almost solid wall. Air is a gas, but compressed like that it will be almost as dense as bricks. At sea level, sound travels at 780 MPH.
For comparison purposes, this booster weighs 19 tons, which is 780 times smaller than that cargo of bombs in the Thames.
I’m with you, Chuck. Far too great a risk. A tiny, pedantic, British point. The Thames River is in CT. To Londoners it’s always the River Thames, or just, the Thames. Sorry about that!
Ross,
Thanks for the factoid. Updated to reflect your kind observation.
This is from wikipedia
“One of the reasons that the explosives have not been removed was the unfortunate outcome of a similar operation in July 1967 to neutralize the contents of Kielce, a ship of Polish origin, sunk in 1946 off Folkestone in the English Channel. During preliminary work Kielce, containing a comparable amount of ordnance, exploded with force equivalent to an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale, digging a 20-foot-deep (6 m) crater in the seabed and bringing “panic and chaos” to Folkestone, although no injuries”
If you do the detonation during daylight, at the highest tide possible and with high speed cameras set up to see if the explosion throws any munitions you minimize the risk as much as possible.
On a side note I lived near Fort McClellan/Anniston Army Depot in Anniston Alabama during the 90’s when they discovered that stored 105 and 155mm gas howitzer shells were leaking. They set up non vented igloos until they could build an incinerator to get rid of the shells for good.