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In this video, we investigate why fishing vessels sometimes catch explosives, and what happened to one vessel in particular when she did.
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Sadly the skipper, Lewis Mulhearn passed away on the 21st of January of this year. The explosion caused him a serious head injury, three broken vertebrar, a broken sternum, knee damage, a fractured orbital bone ans mulitple face lacerations. His actions after the explosion led to a commendation for bravery and in 2021 he was awarded the Emile Robin Award. He was 39 and left a wife and three children.
Oh damn. Poor guy. I hope his family can get compensation from somewhere.
Sorry, forgot to mention he also had two step kids.
Yep he helped me get off too- be dearly missed for that - r.i.p. lewwy
You from Grimsby then
If his hometown maybe asks Germany, perhaps they can help with considerable compensation.
That they could figure out which bomb it was from a metal fragment is impressive.
You can learn a lot from chemical samples about all kinds of things from WW2. (Or today.) Technology was advancing so rapidly that chemical makeup of materials relevant to the war-effort changed massively between years. The availability of some of the TNT components was likely fluctuating massively over the years. You can do the same with the armour on a lot of the tanks. As the war went on German armour became more and more impure. For some of the materials you add to steel, for the production of armour, they even ran out completely. Stuff like molybdenum, manganese, vanadium and chromium are only present in very low amounts when used correctly. Like manganese at around 0.3%. With vanadium, steel is supposed to contain even less. If it contains more than 0,05% the steel can already become brittle.
To add to the above commenter's excellent points about the chemistry of the deposited explosives, there's also the metal piece itself. There might have been indicative markings that could be used to identify it, but also things like the thickness of the metal and its composition, or even manufacturing features such as screw holes and the like that can help narrow down the list of suspects. It wouldn't surprise me if EOD teams have little compendium books with pictures and the designs of various ordinances to help in their identification. When doing forensic analysis like this, you might not have any one clear "tell", but rather a sum of clues that narrow it down. But yes, it is impressive.
It really is just educated guessing.
@@interstellarsurfer It's not. It's drawing conclusions from very reliable tests. There is basically no guessing.
Considering that it was a WW2 bomb. Analysis should also show that it has no radioactive traces, since the first nukes where unleashed in 45
When I was learning navigation, I was amazed by how many "unexploded ordnance danger" areas were marked on various charts. Pretty fascinating!
Agreed. I was looking at at my GPS chart of a place I fished often, at the mouth of a harbor and wondered those bomb looking things were. Turns out they are bombs!
@@kentwicker6818 Yep, they are all over the place off the south shore of Long Island.....
Here be dragons indeed.
As a Canadian fishing off our western shores I cannot relate in the slightest. But ill take my skippers hat off to you guys for the dangers I didn't even know existed off the coast of the British Isles. War is garbage.
When widening the harbour mouth b y me they also found the submarine defences, on plan made from relatively lightly reinforced concrete, were in fact reinforced with lots of old rail, which was available easily, unlike the reinforcing rods, as old rail being sent for smelting and conversion into bomb cases. Thus there were a few sections cut out and lifted up by a heavy lift crane, and then suspended under a barge, for towing out to be dumped off shore, as large pieces, because they were near impossible to otherwise break or move. They also found a fair amount of unexploded ordnance, though most of it was unfused, simply dropped overboard from loading ships in a rush, and never recovered.
Not about bombs in the sea, but here in germany there are around 5000 bombs found every year and often detonated when they're uncovered in fields or more commonly during construction in urban areas. It's surprisingly common that people need to be evacuated from large areas in cities because yet another one was found and needs to be taken care of. There's still enough undetonated ordnance in the ground to last us another several decades.
It's common in France and Belgium too. Farmers discovering bombs and shells when they plow their fields is so common that it's been nicknamed the "iron harvest".
@@yetanother9127 The Zones Rouges in France are scary. 100+ years later and they're still too dangerous to inhabit.
True. Every year they find one in Germany it seems.
Same in Japan; they most often come out during excavation work.
Even here in Czech Republic, if you start some large construction project, its a toss up whether you will find some neolithic remains, something from middle ages or just WW2 ordonance.
The scariest horde of unexploded ordnance is the one carried on SS Richard Montgomery. She's still there under the Thames Estuary beside a busy shipping lane.
while the SS RM could cause substantial damage if the munitions are disturbed, the location is well known and marked. detonation is extraordinarily unlikely
@@winterwatson6811 Until 💥
The explosive are very unstable. It will be a very Big Bang with lots of destruction. Tic, tic, tic…
the thing there is that trying to clear her is more likely to cause a disaster than just having traffic avoid her. so she's going to stay where she is pretty much indefinitely.
He's made a video on that.
I have experience myself with unexploded ordnance at sea. Last Summer i was in the Phillipines working on a Dredger, and one operation we sucked in a phosphorus bomb inside our pipe. When we had finished loading the ship, we were lifting the pipes and dragheads up. Just as the draghead was lifted above water, smoke and fire started coming out of it. Fortunately no one got injured and there was no explosion due to that phosphorus does not explode, but it rather burns when in contact with oxygen.
there could have been an explosive charge in that bomb to disperse the phosphorus
@@dghtr79_36 perhaps, i am not an expert on explosives :)
The Philippines have the same UXO problem as Europe. Especially Manila, which was bombed flat during the Battle of Manila in 1945.
Phosphorus is nasty stuff, once it starts burning there's no way to put it out other than sealing it up. I hope the wind was blowing the fumes away from you and your crew members, because those are pretty unhealthy.
@@Leon_Schuit guess the only countries to use these atrocities
Stuff like this and the iron harvest on the continent are really some of the most terrifying aspects of all things post-conflict. Years, decades even a century later and unexploded ordinance is still a very real threat.
Reminds me of incidents were people who found amber suddenly burst into flames: Somewhere in Norther Germany they had the problem that phosphorus from the airforce training with incendiary bombs ended up in the water, formed these yellow clumps, and sometimes washed up on a nearby beach. These clumps looked like amber, so some tourists picked them up and put them in their pockets. But once the phosphorus was dry it self-ignited and caused serious burns
Ohhhhhhh yes I heard about that too I was too old then but I dont know why you are ruining everyone's life again
After the war over a million tons of amunition were dumped into the north and baltic sea. A the coastline of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern phosphorus disguised as amber can be found. It starts burning at body temperatur. The soldiers of the east german army were send there for vacation and a doctor told, that they collected this "amber" as souvenir and put it their pokets. They were wearing suits made of synthetic fibers and when the "amber" starts to burn, the fibers were melted on their skin. Today at the beaches were warning signs, but they are so small, that they were difficult to see. The authorities are more concerned about more scared tourists than injured ones.
And more than one fishing boat crew in the Baltic sea has died from mustard, Phosgene and other ww1 gas shells...😢
You are talking about ambergris 😂 not amber! Totally different material.
yikes, poor tourists
There's an area in the north Irish Sea known as the Beaufort Trench, sometimes called Beaufort Dyke, it lies between Northern Island and Scotland. After WW2 the British military dumped 15.000 tonnes of explosives, poison gas, rockets and much more.
My Dad could remember convoys of trucks passing through his village on the way to Stranraer and other Scottish ports which were used for this disposal. Rumour was that because fuel was still on ration, some of the skippers dumped their cargo once they were out of sight of land so they could use the "saved" fuel for their own use. I can think of a couple of occasions in the last few years where phosphorus bombs have washed up on the English side of the Solway Firth.
Where Boris Johnson suggested a bridge be built...
@@alastairward2774 The Hollywood movie about Operation Market Garden, which was titled, A Bridge to Far could be applied to Bonkers Boris and his idea to build a bridge to Northern Island.
The most beautiful beach in Ireland is Benone strand. As a kid in the 90s we'd visit but half way along was a British army base where they would do beach invasions and bombing runs. There would be all these red flags on the pristine beach with signs saying live bombing exercise in progress, do not cross.
The next time I buy fish, I'll be sure the label says it's certified "Bomb Safe".
It still always surprises me how many explosives dumping grounds and unexploded ordinance locations on our charts (Canada). I can't imagine what it would be like in the UK. Thanks for the video!
That's interesting, I never think of Canada as having been bombed. Was this WW2?
@@alexythemechanic8056 Yes, WWII, though we weren't bombed. A lot of it is discarded ordinance, though we did have German U-boats in our waters. Several ships were lost during the Battle of the St. Lawrence.
@Alexy the Mechanic It is a combination of of discarded ordinance and leftovers from live fire training. After all, who counted (or cares) how many of the 200+ rounds you just fired into that lake didn't go off? And who's going to mind if you dump a few hundred (thousand(s)) more pieces of ordinance in there at the end of the war? It's not like it is nearby any significant pop center. Yet.
Those fishing nets give some explosive results!
That was just marketing, until it was more than so
gross
I guess the business really was booming...
One was found in Great Yarmouth (uk) recently where they’re currently building a new bridge. It was a 500kg ww2 bomb. The bomb disposal unit built a barricade around it and when they were trying to make it inert, it blew up. No one was hurt as there was a huge exclusion zone around it. I found it amazing it hadn’t already gone up as they’d been pile driving for the foundations of the bridge for weeks beforehand and the vibration from that could be felt a quarter of a mile away!
Reading the MAIB report you linked... wow those guys got a rough ride, I had no idea from your video how badly injured they were.
Of the seven people on board, only two came away with minor injuries. That night watchman had quite a rough awakening.
Many of the casualties from a bomb, shell, missile, mine, or torpedo hit on a naval vessel come from people and objects being thrown around by the impact. This is why modern Royal Navy vessels use the command "brace, brace, brace" to indicate that a projectile is about to hit, so the crew have time to grab onto something solid. (You can hear it in a simulated damage control environment here: kzhead.info/sun/q7x8ZrlohZiAmnA/bejne.html )
@@Leon_Schuit I sure did
former sailor on a minehunting vessel here there are marked areas on navigational maps where a fishing vessel can cut the nets of if they have mine or bomb in it then report the position and the bomb/mine gets destroyed later by local authorities for the Baltic Sea that is done by local countries through for WW2 bombs or mines Germany is doing that (for reparation and for training of the crews of course)
On land the problem is much worse, since there are tons of stuff left over from both wars, and people are digging all the time. In northern France, some of the UX shells contain fun stuff like mustard gas & phosgene.
i like the artistic design of his fishing boats 😀
they look so stubby xD
That’s pretty accurate actually. There’s a real schematic in the linked report
It's a European thing. Up around the north Atlantic the sea is quite rough the shape of these boats is to handle that
I work local to Portsmouth taking in dredged aggregate, we get A LOT of munitions, all dead so far.
wow lucky
I've made a little research about how much unexploded ordnance was simply dumped into the sea after the war and it is terrifying!
That's basically how modern torpedoes work. Rather than directly striking the ship, they now pass underneath and explode, breaking the ship's back.
Your videos are consistently well researched and presented. Thank you.
My brother was on the team dredging Portsmouth for the carriers. Don't think that bomb you mentioned was the only one they found. A fair few cannonballs too. They did a magnetic survey first, then used sonar and cameras on the end of a long arm digger to investigate each target. After that it obviously depened what they found.
When speaking of weaponry, there is no letter "i" in the word "ordnance." When you do include that letter, you are speaking of a kind of law.
Learning something new. There should be an ordinance on unexploded ordnance. 👍
It comes from Napoleonic French which was really just an odd spelling of ordinance. Same with personnel. So much of modern military terminology comes from Napoleon.
Deadliest Catch 😂 And that is not just limited to UK, bombs kept popping up all over Germany too. I heard Emma Cruise in her video that her cruise was delayed because they found a WWII bomb near a German cruise port.
They're also still found during digging works in cities that were bombed during WWII, sometimes in city centers.
@@Leon_Schuit In 2019, Poland even found a 12000 lb (5400 kg) Tallboy bomb in a canal, where it had been dropped during an attack on a pocket battleship. It wound up detonating during defusal, but no one was hurt.
same problem here here the Netherlands about anywhere you place a shovel in the ground you can find explosives from the war.
Gave as good as we got it seems, I know a lot of bombs were found when London's docklands were being turned into a business district in the 1980s.
Growing up on the coast in the 1950's was littered with everything. It was heaven.
The report was great reading . Lobster fishing there more scarier than southern ocean . Well trained crew did a great job well done lads .
i've had my own encounter with "unexploded ordinances", though in my case it turned out to just be the fins of a training mortar shell, so no actual explosives in it. finding something like that isn't to uncommon when mountaineering in certain parts of switzerland. the alps are a convenient empty target for artillery training. so some area get blocked of regularly for exercises. in theory the army is supposed to have cleared out all unexploded munitions before opening it to the public again, but you can never be 100% sure. so as a rule, better be safe than sorry and stay away from any metal objects you're not positively certain what they are and notify the appropriate people if you see anything.
As an American i find it interesting that areas your army uses for target practice get reopened to the public. Here land is usually permanently owned by the military and nobody is allowed on it for a variety of reasons (their security, our personal safety). We also don't have a shortage of "public lands" that are technically owned by all citizens so everyone has a right to access and enjoy them, although depending on the classification the list of permitted activities change. (You can hunt in a national forest but not in a national park for example)
@@jasonreed7522 we don't have a lot of land in switzerland, plus about a third of the population is or was in the military anyway, so secrecy isn't that big a deal either. i mean one of our main tank training courses is used as a bmx track on weekends. just remember, if you're ever over here and there is a chain across a road with a military sign on it, don't duck under it, live round crossing the road always have right of way.
@@saladiniv7968 its just an assumption of mine that even in a relatively small nation that the military would have a parcel of land next to a military base that is designed as a permanent firing range. (More so for vehicles, artillery, and aircraft than ground troops whose ranges can be mostly indoors if absolutely necessary) And i definitely understand that flying bullets have the right of way in all situations. At the moment its unlikely i will visit but I'm young and that may change. As for the difference in available land, basic googling reveals that Switzerland has an area of about 16,000mi^2 [41,400km^2] and the Greater Houston are is 10,000mi^2 [25,900km^2], so one of our cities is over half the size of your nation. (not accounting for topography, i also only know this to make fun of Houston for only being 1.3x as dense as a very mountainous nation of similar size) America just has an obscene amount of land compared to most European countries, so it makes sense that we have different land use practices.
@@jasonreed7522 as a rule, many fixed distance ranges are shared with local shooting clubs. there are a couple training grounds for urban fighting (repurposed old factory sites) which are owned by the military itself and therefore are of limit. vehicle and artillery live fire is done at specific sites in the alps, but there are tracks crossing those sites. so during exercises and cleaning up afterwards (just a couple times a year, most training is with blancks or in simulators) those tracks are closed. when they're open you're strongly encouraged to not leave them, but i don't think it would actually be illegal. the airforce does only one live fire exercise a year, but if you're interested in military jets you really have to put that on your bucket list. there is basically no other exercises where civilians can get that close to the action and definitely no other exercises in such a spectacular landscape. it's called "axalp fliegerschiessen" if you want to check out some videos of it.
@@jasonreed7522 plus if you really want to make fun of how low density houston is, about 60% of switzerland is almost uninhabited mountains, so really 90% of us live in the remaining 40% of the country.
I was the Marine Safety Office San Francisco Bay Command Duty Officer when a trawler pulled up a pre-WWII torpedo. Casing was bronze, which told it was before we joined the war, and it was loaded with Torpex, the unstable explosive that blew up Port Chicago during the war. It was rolled over the side in more than 1,000 fathoms and the location noted by GPS, so that one, at least, is known and likely secure forever
Bombs and mines on- and offshore are very common. The Dutch Navy has a special fleet for them, but they are not used as often as they were in the past, they have been very succesful over the years. The minesweepers are wooden vessels, so anti-magnetic, which is important for certain types of mines. But still, very often at windfarm, port expansion or city building projects do reveal WW II explosives.
great video as always
I hope fishermen get a promotion for catching explosives that may give them an experience of a lifetime
"It was THIS BIG!"
What's the promotion for fishermen, genuinely asking
@@Gebri3l Fisherfisherman. A fisherman who fishes fishermen.
Who knew?? Thank you for another fine presentation. Brilliant work.
I’m always amazed that these things haven’t degraded to being nearly inert over this many decades. I wonder how long they estimate that might actually take?
Explosives don't become inert with age. In fact, TNT specifically becomes MORE sensitive the longer it sits. That's the primary reason bombs "go bad", they're worried about them going off BEFORE they're supposed to, not "not going off at all".
It's like asking how long it will take a house of cards to fall over one card at a time. It's just not possible, once a few cards fall the whole rest of it will go at once. There's so much potential energy pent up there and it has to go somewhere eventually.
@@tissuepaper9962 That's probably why the "correct" or safest way to dispose of unexploded ordinance is... to let it do the thing it was designed to do, and make it explode on purpose at a specified time after evacuating people and valuables form the area rather than when those people and/or things might be near it. There's another way tho. Many high explosives will happily burn without any chance of exploding, C4 is famously one of them. And because C4 has both fuel and oxidizer in it, it theoretically would burn anywhere (including underwater and in space), not just on the surface of Earth. Cordite was used in some early lower-performance solid rocket motors because of this, they had a very good understanding of what rate the different shapes of cordite strands would burn at, so they could pick a very slow burning one (big chunks and/or strands, or just a full on "solid rocket propellant grain" shape for a core-burning solid rocket motor like is used in modern SRMs) for solid rocket motors and a faster burning (more powder like) form for gunpowder. At lower temperatures still, many high explosives will melt. These are called "cast-able" high explosives, and Torpex is one of those. That's the kind usually used in air-dropped bombs and sea mines. Those two facts I just went over result in the possibility of just melting the explosives out of the bomb or mine casing, and then sending the resulting unstable high explosives to an incinerator for disposal. However, this treatment is usually used for munitions that were stockpiled and never used, rather than armed devices found as UXO. In other words, when they take a given type of artillery piece or bomb out of service (and in the case of the artillery piece the ammunition for it no longer fits any existing or stockpiled weapon in inventory), in modern times the "melt out the explosives and incinerate them" treatment is usually how they dispose of the ammunition that no longer has a purpose, rather than just dumping it in the ocean where it can cause headaches further down the line. Sure beats putting it in a deep hole, and it's not like the explosives are gonna be able to be put to use safely in another weapon, so that's the best thing to do with it. Modern explosives might be changing that tho, they're part of what's called "insensitive munitions, basically they take a REALLY hard shock to make explode, and so they're considered a lot harder to "cook off" or make explode in any other than the intended way, so MAYBE those explosives will be able to be reused if we ever have any left over from something we're not using anymore.
Wouldn't the metal rust to the point all the explosive stuff would leak out and dissipate?
@@peytonmac1131 Not when the metal's most of an inch thick and the seawater at that depth doesn't have much oxygen in it (or better yet, it was buried in sand or mud that also keeps the oxygen away from it even better). Oxygen is what really causes the rust. Salt and water just speed up the process. Without any oxygen, you can't oxidize metal, makes sense to me at least.
i love your videos they make me happy because boats and ships are one of my special interests, i would love to learn how Dredgers work. so im probably going to spend some time researching them
Have a look at the Maritime college on Terschelling, Netherlands. They have an amazing dredge simulator. The Dutch specialise in dredging, and that college has been teaching mariners since before where I live was considered a country.
The balticn sea is full of all kinds of explosives and chemical munitions as well, it was used as a dumping ground after both the first and second world war.
Okay, the cartoonish representation of a cute boat jumping out of the water at 0:22 was oddly funny
A big part of trying to find ammo is predicting how different sea currents may have washed them away since the war. Especially the Bundeswehr is veeeery interested into those predictions and is willing to spend a shit ton of money to research them
Oil and gas pipelines are regularly inspected and they used to keep ROV records on videotapes. It would be convenient to change tapes near a feature. They did this next to a round boulder that had been dragged by trawlers next to the pipeline. The net skipped over leaving the boulder behind. Then someone remarked that the boulder was particularly round. It was actually a mine. The navy disposed of a lot of unused ordnance after the war in 'deep water' now well within fishing and pipeline depths.
Why do fishing boats “catch” explosives? Because they are looking for a blast! 💥
It's interesting how relaxed we all are about the fact, that most of us in Europe live pretty close to unexploded bombs. In Germany around 5000 unexploded bombs are found each year.
Dont worry bro The US admited they lost 6 nukes
"Dredger Dredgerson." Lol.
Wow very informative video
Great stuff. One point though; you mean ordnance, not ordinance. Ordinance means the giving of orders.
it happens regularly in the waters sorrounding Denmark too: post WW2 lots of munitions were dumped, close to Denmark..including german made chemical shells, in an area close to the island of Bornholm..in the 1980s it wasn't unheard of for fishing vessels to ocasionally snag one of these shells with their nets. Other examples include, in 2010, where a fishing vessel snagged a German mine and brought it into Skagen harbour, where it was left without contacting the authorities >
Their everywhere and the amount of ships corroding away leaving fuel and other materials leaking out that’s not being taken care of either
:eyepop: wow, that MAIB report linked in the description is a pro read. That is one tough built hull to soak that hit and not crack open.
At the beginning of the 'James Bond' movie, "For Your Eyes Only" (starring Roger Moore as 'Bond') a U.K. secret, intelligence, seagoing vessel, which is disguised as a fishing boat, accidentally pulls up an unexploded sea-mine which detonates against the hull of the ship causing the ship to sink and setting off the plot for the rest of the movie.
i really appreciate the effort that went into animating Portsmouth haha
It's nice to read an accident report where the crew were both well trained and well equipped with safety gear. So many times you hear about owners being cheap about safety.
Here in Italy theres a story probably not well known but in the war the Tuscan mountain/peninsula Monte Argentario and the areas and archipelago around it were a strategic point during the war The story goes of a young couple going on a small boat in one of the 2 ports (Porto Santo Stefano) And they were behind tugboat which had the job of opening and closing the torpedo net for ships, that day when the tugboat was (either opening or closing it not sure) but it was spotted by an english sub stalking the nearby waters, the couple started hearing coastal batteries and some stationed on the mountain firing out into the sea, as the sub tried to fire a torpedo at the tugboat but it malfunctioned and it resorted to sinking the tugboat by cannon fire (the couple hearing the rounds flying near them went away) But the point of this story is that years later after the war one of those people found out that a trawler/fishing boat was fishing somewhere outside the port when it caught the torpedo that had malfunctioned and it blew up sinking the ship, the couple said that if the the torpedo didn’t malfunction they would have died being in the blast radius
haha nice animations are those fishing vessels really that deep/tall? they look like pumped up shoes
Some fishing vessels are built like that to whitstand harsher conditions at sea. Fishing vessels are known to have incredible stabilty even during storms
Go read the report he linked. It has the vessel’s schematic
If the EU and other National governments required all ships over a certain size operating out of there ports to have magnetometers linked to GPS scanning at all times the areas around high traffic areas would get so much data that finding old bombs would be a lot easier. It would also provide heaps of other useful info. If you have a lot of vessels crossing the same area often you wouldn't need super high resolution either. A lot of money is spent by tax payers to make shipping safe. Shipping companies often use flags of continence to cut cost on regulations particularly when paying crew. Is it so unreasonable that they are forced to do a little geoservey work when going from port to port?
Good point but they may not want you to. Because if everyone finds say 5000 bombs then the government has to find the money to get then out.
@@CaptMarkSVAlcina They don't have to get rid of ALL of the bombs. There's a sunken munitions barge in the Thames river that if it went boom would take out a lot of houses. How do they deal with that? They just marked it on the map. That's all they did. And they required everyone to stay the heck away from it. Similar things would happen with the majority of found ordinance. Or you could send out trained dolphins (or more likely ROVs) to plant disposal charges on them, so that you can actually get rid of them.
@@CaptMarkSVAlcina Just because you know where 5000 bombs are doesn't mean you have to dispose of them all. If you have a good map of where bombs are you can make good plans (eg. sea bed disturbance exclusion zones) If you have no map of where the bombs are you can't make any plans, you do get to find each bomb when it goes boom. Ignorance is bliss until something goes boom.
@@ohnonomorenames That would be an AWFUL idea. Insurance companies would use it as an excuse not to pay out. Some poor fisherman not only loses his boat but doesn't get any compensation because there happened to be a magnetic anomaly (one amongst millions amongst all the lobster pots and other debris) at the point of the accident. Oh yes - you and all the other wise-after-the-event armchair hindsighters would have no problem sitting in judgement from the comfort of your armchairs, gleefully pointing out how at fault the poor man was for not complying with your wonderful new regulations and "exclusion zones", before smugly nipping down to Starbucks for another almond milk latte. It would simply create a blizzard of unnecessary regulation, restriction and bureaucracy - all the stuff faceless bureaucrats like you absolutely LOVE, but in reality, maritime unexploded ordnance is no big deal. You're trying to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
When I was in the U.S. Coast Guard I was stationed in Freeport, Texas. That is west of Galveston on the Gulf of Mexico. Sometime in 1989 or 1990, we had a shrimp boat call us because they had pulled up their net with a 500lb bomb in it. We called a bomb disposal unit from an Army base a couple of hours away to remove it from the boat and detonate it in a field away from any building s or people. It was pretty scary bringing a boat with a bomb hanging in the nets into a port that is full of chemical plants. Lots of precautions were taken and it was handled safely.
I know this story have friends there when it's happened. I was working on that boat too, but left couple weeks before they caught bomb. Lucky they all stayed alive
Before scubadiving became something every man could do with the invention of the regulator the military used to dump old ornande in the sea as well even in shallow enough water to be diveable. In the 1990's some Swedish divers brought home a live 12cm shell to Central stockholm but got worried when the shell started sweating. There was a major commotion when the bomb squad had to close down much of the city. Their justification was that they did not belive anyone would dump ammo at a diveable depth.
Would you be willing to do an episode or 2 on shipping on the great lakes? They're an interesting and unique corner of maritime shipping that seems to go underappreciated.
I watch you when I should be working like I want to change careers to be a seaman haha.
That ain't an ROV, it has a cockpit 🤔 Great video 🙏
There's also a good amount of those at the bottom of the Baltic
I remember a few stories from hanstholm where they pnce caught a german mine...
Magnifying glass can create 100°C, if in water somehow the water reflection increases heat because not moving i think can still explode. Because if droplets on body can be higher temperature if not moving. A way of making magnifying glass is () gluing the border with water inside.
It will never seize to amaze me how they can determine something was a german made air dropped high explosive bomb, just by a piece of metal with tnt residue.
Pretty common for Germany the times i visited northern germany around 1/2 of the forest are marked as dangerous because they contain explosives to really north where 8/10 are marked as such
Further to Germans leaving ordnance all over the place, there was a huge amount of surplus/time expired munitions that were disposed of at the end of both wars. Local maritime companies would be contracted to dispose of the munitions in specific places at a piecemeal rate. Unscrupulous contractors would drop the ordnance short and return for another load. Modern fishermen know where those "short" drops are and they are aware that recovery of said ordnance will damage nets and they are entitle to compensation. So, if the need a new net, the accidentally find some ordnance and put in a claim.
I once saw a peice of film taken on a trawler where they brought up some kind of small torpedo. It didn't look like the giant WWII units, more like maybe a probe and appeared at least in part to be made of plastic. The crew just took it out of the net and casually dumped it next to the cabin(!).
You didn't mention all the ordnance, which was deliberately dumped at sea after the war, in the Atlantic, Irish Sea, north Sea and the Baltic Sea. This stuff also included chemical weapons. There are also still a lot of W2 sea mines around, especially in the Baltic sea.
But I assume the stuff that was deliberately dumped was well charted and in deep or out of the way locations.
@@JohnyG29 Not always
There are chemical shells from the WWI too. Now there are getting pretty much rusted which add more hazards.
As an ex professional fisherman I personally caught 2 bombs like that while working. We just threw it overboard on a place we never fish 😂😂😂😂
I have a question regarding explosives remaining in the seas, hopefully somebody can answer: Many of these explosives in the ocean are close to a century old, the ocean is pretty good at degrading everything. Will there be a certain point in the future, where these explosives will be largely rendered harmless due to degradation over time?
I'm amazed that explosive from ww2 era are still active, considering they're sitting in seabed. I thought the explosive would be inactive after those long periods of time and in such conditions
Well the paint it self acts as a antifouling coating, the steel is more then a inch or two thick in most places (not sure can't verify or check for obvious reasons) and these are dropped bombs rather then propelled ones so theres no exhaust ports, plus the sea bed it self may preverse these in the sand, and you only have to deal with about 100ish years of surface rust that's just not disturbed, No metal fatigue and no electrical differential across the unit, The name of the game with rust is cycling, If nothing knocks off top most layer of rust it begins to act as an anti-rust agent, can't rust something that's already rusted.
@@sdfxcvblank5756 My first thought is that rust form and cracking the explosive then seawater will seep through the crack and wet the powder inside and disabling the explosive. But after your explanation I get what your point is, Thanks for the explanation
There's also the fact that some,and I would assume more after WWII itself,were dropped without arming them,so the fuse itself would be in no state to go off if whatever safety it had corroded away. No idea what a cracked bomb with the exposed explosive filler would do,though.
The chemicals in the explosives are inherently unstable to begin with, age increases the instability making it far easier for them to detonate with even a minor disturbance.
@@nightowl8163 Even explosives used all the way back in WWII were using high explosives and not black powder. The stuff they were using is closer in composition to something like C4 or Semtex or TNT, rather than black powder. This isn't Minecraft, TNT has nothing to do with black powder and sand. It has more in common with double-base smokeless gunpowder than black powder. The defining characteristic of nearly all of these high explosives is that they will still go off even if they're soaked thru with water, all it takes is a sufficiently strong shock to set them off. Because that's exactly what the fuse in the bomb or mine or whatever is designed to supply, if the fuse is still functional in any way, it can (and will) still go boom given the right (or wrong) opportunity. It doesn't even matter if the casing is rusted thru or not, with this much high explosives the shock itself will cause damage to shipping. For example, most depth charges are just a generic thin-walled steel drum filled up with high explosives, and equipped with a fuse set to detonate at a specific depth under water. And then they weigh them down with enough ballast weight to get it to sink rapidly, because most high explosive formulations are lighter than water, or only slightly heavier, so ballast weight is needed. In the case of an air-dropped bomb, because the casing is so much thicker, that will provide the ballast weight needed, but the fuse is set to go off on impact, so all it takes is tapping the right (or wrong) part of the bomb to get it to go off. Alternatively you can place an external explosive charge on the bomb and detonate it when YOU want it to go off, that's how they dispose of them safely (using ROV's to place the charges of course).
Read quickly into the accident report. The injuries of the crew were pretty severe. Broken bones and damaged joints from the sudden scceleration. I hope they make a good recovery. RIP Master Lewis Mulhearn. 😟 F***ing war. Greetings from Germany
I dredged up a phosphorus bomb while scallop fishing off the coast of New York. Captain said to just throw it back. There are several ammo dumps along the coast marked on the charts.
Fun fact, Bombs have a really explosive personality
the north sea and baltic sea are full of ammunition. In some cases, ammunition left over after the war was simply thrown overboard. The live ammunition rots away and can explode at any time. This also applies to bombs from WW2 that have not yet been found on land.
_Watertight bulkheads!_ YES! That's what I'm talking about! More of those, less chances your ship goes to meet Davey Jones.
Here in Denmark we still get sea mine washing up on the west coast on occasions also, some of them are even from the first world war.
Is this the fishing ship who was helped by Esvagt Njord? Remember they responded to a similar incident couple of years ago
not quite sure which is more sad - that the remnants of wars are still killing people up to a hundred years later; or the fact we still have people around who think wars are a good idea.
With the advent of autonomous, battery powered mapping ROVs, hopefully it will become cheap enough to feasibly map some of these areas
The timing of this video is too good. Just got to shore after surveying the waters between Catalina and LA. Found thousands of unexploded depth charges and dumped ammo from naval AA guns. We actually tried picking a depth charge up before we realized what it was.
250 lbs bomb, thank goodness, I think the average bomb loads were heavier, 500 lbs bombs were what dive bombers and torpedo bombers used though maybe that was later in the war because I'm thinking about carrier warfare in the pacific, with the amount of damage caused double the explosion might have lead to fatalities
It's a German bomb, so it's in metric. The explosives are usually only about half of the mass of the bomb. So if the explosive fill was 123 kg, that's almost 125kg, which means that it was probably a 250kg bomb, *2.2 to convert to pounds, that's a 550 pound bomb overall. Not so small as you think, gotta remember your unit conversions!
@@44R0Ndin I think you're right but just looked it up, the Dauntless carried a thousand pound bomb and it was almost 2000 lbs total, in the scheme of things, for anti ship weapons a 500 lbs bomb is quite small and that's what I meant, if it was an anti ship munition I think it would have been up to 4 times bigger and that would have been terrible.
@@bencheevers6693 Thanks for clearing that up, yeah a 500lb bomb probably won't do a whole lot to a ship unless it gets into the magazine or something and even then it's not the bomb itself doing most of the work...
Would it be economical to repair a fishing vessels with such damage to the hull? I can't imagine that would buff out easily
A trawler from my country caught a mustard gas container in the trawl and it gassed the whole crew when it got dragged up on the trawldeck
@BOB K ?
After World War 2 a lot of ammo was dumped into the sea. I Germany mostly the Baltic sea. Bombs and other explosives in fishing equipment happen from time to time. More problematic is the mentioned phoshor from ignition bombs, because it looks like amber. In Germany we have an special department who handle old ammo.
I don't know how you resisted the urge to call it "Dregdey McDregderface", but "Dredger Dredgerson" is just as good 🤣 Also, it would be really interesting to see a video on how dredgers actually work sometime, but maybe that might be starting to go a little outside the scope of this channel? 🤔
Gives a whole new meaning to "there she blows"
Can not.belive this is the same boat i can remember when it happen not to far from are fishing ground and out off.the.same Grimsby fish dock
there are some lakes in Finland that you are not allowed to magnetic fish do to unexploded explosives
i have caught countless bombs, mines, torpedoes and what not. even caught the same mine 3 times in 2 days.
That's some good manufacturing that bombs still work after 80+ years of laying around in elements. These days bombs stop working after a few years.
You can still find grenades from the napoleonic wars or even from the 17th century in Germany. I don't think there is a high risk that such old black powder explosives could still go off, and they also used more solid iron projectiles in that time. In France, there are still areas that are scarred by WWI. The grass has returned, but the craters remain. I'm not sure about bombs and mines from WWI. Before WWII, it wasn't as common for urban areas to be the target at least....
It was a good thing it didn't get on board the ship but blew underneath...
Thought I was clicking a link to view a video about that ship, not download a pdf file. I wouldn't have clicked it it had I known it was a pdf.
the bomb being lifted up off the bottom, came loose, fell and struck the detonator is a way more realistic possibility
Sad to hear
Great video! As well as bombs, there must be *hundreds* of WWII aircraft in the sea around the UK. There'd be a lot of sunken U-boats and a few Allied subs as well.
Dang… I’m glad no one was killed on that fishing boat 😮❤
In the German North and Baltic Sea there is an estimated 1,6 million tons of conventional ammunition and 5,000 tons of chemical lying about
It's devestating to think that these kinds of dangers will still exist a century from now for the wars ongoing right now, especially in Ukraine where insane amounts of mines and artillery are being used.
Is there any kind of insurance 'claim system' for damages caused by these things, or is it just a case of 'blame-free random blow-ups' & the vessel owner's bad luck?
Solution: GIANT MAGNETS. You're welcome.
I'd be disappointed if the immediate response to the explosion under the fishing boat wasn't "Okay, who farted?" How well do metal detectors work under water? I'd think that would be the obvious way of finding them. But would probably come up with a lot of false positives, as surely there's a lot of harmless bits of metal all over the sea floor - lost fishing gear and crab pots, assorted dropped hardware, pieces of cargo, fragments of bombs that have already exploded, remains of shipwrecks, and so on.
Don't forget that seawater itself is also conductive, so that will limit the effectiveness of metal detectors. The basic way they work is you flow DC current through 1 loop, and detect current in a second loop right next to the powered loop. Anytime you move the metal detector over a conductive object you induce a current in that object which changes the field from the detector, which is then induces a current in the unpowered loop, which triggers the sensor/alarm. Seawater being conductive might cause a lot of false positives even before considering all of the metal on the sea floor (pipes, cables, scrap, and ordinance just to name a few categories)
@@jasonreed7522 That's what I was wondering - if they'd work underwater. I live in a landlocked state and have never used a metal detector, so I'm pretty clueless.
@@quillmaurer6563 after some google searching i have found out that modern metal detectors are a bit smarter than the theoretical one from my college physics class, they use different electrical inputs and can electronically sort the output signals to try and filter out different conductive objects. Modern detectors even work in saltwater, but it took a lot of effort to overcome the many hurdles associated with the effects of being near the sea floor. Also i will point out that metal detectors have a limited depth, typically measures in inches and have small loops of detection, making hand searching a slow process and impractical for ordinance detection if you don't already know basically where it is.