How to dispose of a house full of explosives?

[paaiyan]

It's been there for months and the residents have been "safe" so far.

Govt suit #1: "Let's see, shall we.... evacuate residents and try to cart it all out in one bunch?"

Govt suit #2: "No, no that's too risky."

GS#1: "Oh, the stuff seems stable enough to not evac residents while it's in there, let's just cart it off bit by bit and dispose of it!"

GS#2: "No, that's still too risky."

GS#3: "Hey, let's build a wall around it and set it on fire!"

GS#2: "Yeah, that'll do the trick!"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101206/...xplosive_house

[DefensiveCarry.com]

[ctsketch]

Oh this should be fun

[Hiram25]

Yep, let's play with fire!

[HKinNY]

What can possibly got wrong?

[OPFOR]

Got time for a kinda funny, if gruesome, story?

When I was in Afghanistan with .mil, we spent a lot of time rooting out, uncovering, and recovering/destroying caches of weapons, explosives, and ordnance. Because we operated pretty far from our FOB and didn't have immediate access to EOD, we would generally "recover" whatever ordnance we found, as long as it was un-fused and in relatively good shape. After a few months of this, we became rather cavalier about handling rockets, mortars, mines, recoilless rifle rounds, rocket propelled grenades, and all the other assorted goodies that we would find. (As a side note – military ordnance is inherently pretty darned stable – even the Russian and Chinese that we most commonly dealt with. A 107mm rocket simply isn’t going to go off because you drop it, assuming that it hasn’t been fused/primed or damaged in some way…) If it was very small (one mortar round, or something), we would blow it in place if we could. If it was small enough to load on a HMMWV, we’d load it up and haul it to the giant demo area where EOD would set off 100,000lb-at-a-time dets. If it was too big, maybe we’d break it up into smaller loads and transport it back in serials…

Well, eventually we found a cache that proved extremely problematic. It was BIG, several hundred assorted rockets/mortars/etc, many of them 120mm. It was right smack in the middle of the local village, buried in a walled compound. And it was in BAD shape; rusted, exposed explosives, some of it fused…in other words, not something we wanted to touch. We called out the Engineers – they said “we’re not touching it.” We sat and waited for EOD (Estonians – very good at their job, and generally FEARLESS when it come to working with stuff that blows up). They said “we’re not touching it.” We couldn’t blow it in place, because it would have leveled the entire town. So...what to do?

I asked the BN Commander, and his response was genius: Hire some locals and a jingle truck to load it up and haul it out. Done and done.

We contracted with a local guy who owned a truck, and he brought over two of his buddies to help load up the ordnance. The rest of the platoon and I sat around outside the walls of the compound, smoking and joking as bored grunts are so prone to do. After an hour or so, I sent one on my squad leaders in to check on the locals’ progress. No sooner had he passed the threshold of the compound gates when

BOOOOOOM!!!!!!

The world exploded. Fire flashed inside the compound, and a deafening blast nearly knocked us all off of our feet. Ordnance was raining down from the sky, while a dozen recon/snipers dashed around like headless chickens looking for somewhere to hide from the deadly downpour. “Holy crap,” I thought, I just killed SSG M, and who knows what else.

I started for the gate (yeah, I know, dumb, but I needed to go find my SL), and remember seeing my Platoon Sergeant seek cover by diving into a pool of water…unfortunately, the pool was only about 4” deep, and he ended up making face-down mud angels trying to burrow further away from the steel and fire that was still falling from the sky. Smaller explosions rocked the compound, and the occasional THUD of falling debris added to the cacophony.

As I ran for the gate, I saw SSG M come staggering out. He was covered, basically head to toe, in blood and gore. I couldn’t believe he was standing, much less walking… I ran up and grabbed him, and dragged him back to my (up-armored) HMMWV, all the while saying “it’s ok, Sergeant, you’re going to be ok…” Amazingly, he was agreeing.

“I’m ok, Captain, I’m ok.”

“God bless him,” I thought, he’s fighting. I threw him across the back seats of the HMMWV, grabbed my medical kit, and called for help. With a tourniquet in hand, I started ripping off his DCU blouse and t-shirt, looking for major bleeds. Amazingly, I wasn’t finding any. No massive punctures, no missing limbs…what the hell?

“Seriously, Sir, I’m OK.”

“What the hell happened?!”

“Well, Sir,” he began, rather loudly since he had some serious tinnitus going on, “I don’t know, exactly. Just as walked into the compound, I saw the locals at work. Two of them were in the back of the truck, and one was on the ground. The one on the ground was throwing up rounds – I think they were 107 warheads – to the two in the truck, and those two were stacking them up. Well, I was about 10 meters away when one of the guys on the truck missed the rocket that was thrown to him, and it fell. I guess it blew, because the next thing I felt was a massive ‘crunch’ over my whole body. I heard the blast, but it seemed kinda quiet, and I think I blacked out for a second or two. When I started coming-to, I saw all this blood, and thought I was dead. But really, the only pain I have is like I got gut punched by Mike Tyson, all over my body!”

The medic came over and we finished checking SSG M for injuries – he basically had none. After the dust – so to speak – settled, we were able to make a pretty good guess what happened.

The local who dropped the rocket took most of that initial blast right into his body, which was hunched over the round as it exploded. A large portion of his body flew straight into SSG M, knocking him flat, and covering him with all that blood and gore. The other two locals were also killed, but SSG M (and everyone else in my platoon) was fine except for scrapes and bruises – mostly earned while ducking and diving from the ordnance that had been blown over the walls of the compound. The living area of the compound was destroyed, but the walls (mostly) survived, and there was minimal damage to other buildings – the “staggered” nature of the detonation meant that there wasn’t one massive explosion that would have destroyed everything for 100 meters…

So, that’s my answer on how to dispose of a house full of explosives.

[CowboyColby]

Wow this could be bad it will be interesting to see how it turns out

[Glocksin]

Cant wait for the videos...

[packinnova]

It's been there for months and the residents have been "safe" so far.

Govt suit #1: "Let's see, shall we.... evacuate residents and try to cart it all out in one bunch?"

Govt suit #2: "No, no that's too risky."

GS#1: "Oh, the stuff seems stable enough to not evac residents while it's in there, let's just cart it off bit by bit and dispose of it!"

GS#2: "No, that's still too risky."

GS#3: "Hey, let's build a wall around it and set it on fire!"

GS#2: "Yeah, that'll do the trick!"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101206/...xplosive_house

Yeah, this is going to end up llike the dummies that tried to blow up the whale on the beach with a crate of dynamite...

[Janq]

OPFOR,

That is the most interesting warfighters first person told story I have read all year, even better than the recently posted here Marine goes into reeds with a CRKT to kill female dog birthright type insurgents.

Thank you for sharing that, and as I've said before thank you for your service as well.

- Janq

[1 old 0311]

What can possibly got wrong?

Does "OOOOOOOOOPS" sound familiar?

[WHEC724]

OPFOR, I've always said that military experience made for stranger than fiction stories, but clearly combat duty makes things even wierder.

Thank you for your service.

[vietnamvet66]

OPFOR, great story. And a BIG THANK YOU FOR YOR SERVICE. Welcome home Brother.

[OPFOR]

Janq/WHEC - thanks. I've been toying with the idea of writing a bunch of our more interesting vignettes into a little book. Not for actual publication, but as a sort of written record/memento of the three years I've got in Iraq/Afghanistan now between my "two jobs." And yes, there are lots of stories out there that would blow the mind of the best fiction writers... :)

[TerriLi]

I so want to youtube that event.

[3D]

So . . does everyone here really know their neighbors well enough to be sure this is the only home like this?



Oh, and here's another reassuring thought: "How the alleged bank robber obtained the chemicals and what he planned to do with them remain mysteries."