land mines!

[thanate]

So the explosives we found yesterday were in fact explosives. WWII German teller mines (sp?), apparently, which it seems were brought back during the war for training/practice purposes, and then when they didn't want them anymore, standard practice was to dig a big hole in the ground, someplace that wasn't being used just then, and toss them all in. Which would be great, if they were just German. But there's also the posibility that there are some Japanese explosives of the same era in there, and when those decay they get to the point where a falling leaf can set them off.

Here is our lovely pile of explosives:



The guys from the base who handle these things said this was the largest deposit (at least on the surface) that they've ever seen. The large ones (about a foot in diameter) are anti-tank, while the smaller ones are person-sized... you can see the shovels & screens in the background for size comparison. They are calling out trained people from Ft Belvoir to explode the whole thing, for which process they'll be evacuating a 1000 meter radius (which is all the way back to the road, a 20 to 30 minute walk) and we don't know yet when this is going to happen. But we'll be allowed back to look at the crater afterwards.

Meanwhile, we find that the phase two we were going to do has been cancelled. This is because they had the sound expert out to look at the area where they were planning on building more firing ranges, where we did a two+ month survey with twice as many crew last fall, and discovered that it's too close to the town of Bowling Green for them to be exploding whatever it was that they wanted to use it for. And so the whole project, which has been in the works for rather a long time & lots of money, has been totally scrapped. And they now need (also according to the sound expert) about twice as much land as they'd originally allocated anyway.

So for some odd reason the base commander is hopping mad about this whole fiasco, and has set a two-week deadline for finding an alternative site. So pending funding stuff (which the company I work for had a sudden useful contribution about-- there's some grant that has to be used east of the Mississippi by this spring or the money has to be returned, so if all goes well, it could be applied here) there may be yet more work. For more people. Wandering around AP Hill, finding nothing. Or perhaps the new range will be on an exciting site! (there was a rumor that some unit was out digging foxholes and found an unmarked slave cemetery at one point...)

Comments

[skittblink.livejournal.com]

Yikes. Does this happen a lot? Just huge, unexploded piles of mines lying around?

[thanate.livejournal.com]

A lot of them have already been found and taken care of. (and this is the first deposit of them we've found, after wandering around various areas for about 3 months now) But it really was just standard practice to pick a place no one was using and dump them in a hole in the ground.