WWII flying bomb found in London

[Miss Neecerie]

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/07/28/britain.wwii.bomb.reut/index.html


Police closed streets near London's Canary Wharf financial district on Saturday after an unexploded German flying bomb from World War II was found on a construction site.

Bomb disposal experts were called in to make the V1 missile safe after it was unearthed close to the east London complex that houses 80,000 office workers during the working week, police said. At weekends the area is busy with shoppers and visitors.

Police closed several roads around the site in Millharbour, a road in the former docklands.

"Ambulance, fire and police are there and the building site has been evacuated," a London police spokesman said. The area was cordoned off, he said. Thousands of V1s, nicknamed "Doodlebugs", were fired at the capital during the war, with the docks a prime target.

Hundreds of unexploded bombs from the war are buried across the country, according to government figures. They are unearthed from time to time, often during building excavations.

Canary Wharf's tenants include Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, HSBC, the Independent newspaper group and Reuters

 

[Fletch]

Hundreds of unexploded bombs from the war are buried across the country

...presumably "buried" from having burrowed into the earth and then failing to detonate. No?

You wonder if there are any instances of anything this old actually going off when disturbed.

...or worse, when not disturbed.

 

[Alan Eardley]

...presumably "buried" from having burrowed into the earth and then failing to detonate. No?

You wonder if there are any instances of anything this old actually going off when disturbed.

...or worse, when not disturbed.

Yes, but not so often as when I were a lad...

Alan

 

[dhermann1]

...presumably "buried" from having burrowed into the earth and then failing to detonate. No?
You wonder if there are any instances of anything this old actually going off when disturbed.
...or worse, when not disturbed.

From the Hot weather thread:

this is the first day in two months that it hasn't rained here, and the temperature is still fairly mild. In fact the rainfall has been unprecedented - Britain has just had the wettest June and July since records began in the 18th century. Large areas of central England have been flooded, first south Yorkshire and now the south west midlands. The scale of the flooding, like the rainfall, is unprecedented - a friend in Oxfordshire has records for his house going back to the 11th century, and as far as he knows it has never flooded before.

Meanwhile southern and eastern Europe bakes in unprecedented heat. I read today that 500 people have died from heatstroke in Hungary and that 19,000 have ben hospitalized in Romania. Apparently temperatures have been so high that unexploded ordnance from the two world wars has been spontaneously exploding. I think I'll take the rain, floods and all.