Last Casuality Of The Civil War

[tabs]

In February 2008 a CW relic hunter was cleaning a Naval Cannon Ball when it exploded killing him. Mr White was 53.




http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080502/ap_on_re_us/cannonball_death

[slodave]

That blows.

[WolfeMacleod]

Originally Posted by slodave

That blows.

baaaaaaaaad

[Joeaksa]

Sad to see. Have done a lot of poking around old battlefields myself and understand why he did it.

[svandamme]

that don't qualify for being a casualty of that war

if he was digging a hole in his backyard for a swimming pool, and got blown up by old ammo, ok, then i might consider it as such... but cleaning a 150 year old , live bomb is just Darwinism @ work.

If everybody in my area started cleaning the 90 year old ammo laying in every piece of the region... we'de have daily body counts posted in the newspaper... Which is why there is something called DOVO, aka, the bombsquad... folks who are payed(not enough) and trained (to the max) to deal with these kinds of things...

[89911]

Is there a big market for properly "restored" cannonballs? Seems unsafe no matter how old they are. He was doing this in his front yard and frequently had his kids around him.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Cannonballs explode?

News to me. I always thought they were just projectiles - big heavy chunks of metal that were lobbed at enemy positions at high velocity because of expanding gas (being shot out of a cannon). I never realized they were themselves fragmentation weapons. Were they?

All the ones I've seen in museums just look like big spherical chunks of metal. No fuses or obvious places where an explosive charge would go. And how would it detonate anyway?

[svandamme]

Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile

Cannonballs explode?

News to me. I always thought they were just projectiles - big heavy chunks of metal that were lobbed at enemy positions at high velocity because of expanding gas (being shot out of a cannon). I never realized they were themselves fragmentation weapons. Were they?

All the ones I've seen in museums just look like big spherical chunks of metal. No fuses or obvious places where an explosive charge would go. And how would it detonate anyway?

a cannon ball technically is anything that's round, and fit's in a cannon
they come in sorts, stone, metal, and shrapnell

the above example, would have been a shrapnel

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Guess that makes sense - kind of like modern artillery. Use the solid/heavy/kinetic energy type shells for punching holes in stuff and use the fragmentation stuff for A.P. uses.

Learn summin' every day. I guess warfare in the 1800s was more sophisticated than I thought.

[gassy]

Learn summin' every day. I guess warfare in the 1800s was more sophisticated than I thought.[/QUOTE]


Ditto--fascinating.

[Por_sha911]

Brenda White is convinced her husband was working on a flawed cannonball, and no amount of caution could have prevented his death.
"He had already disarmed the shell," she said. "From what I was told, there was absolutely nothing he had done wrong, that there was a manufacturing defect that no one would have known was there."

Sounds like its the big bad gun manufacturers fault again!

[svandamme]

if it has live explosives in it, then it ain't bloody disarmed now is it?!
manufacturing defect me bollocks, it's 150 years old weaponry...
as if they designed those things to be laying in the mud and clay for that amount of time

civil war weapon specs
- must kill other side en masse
- must not explode before it get's to the other side
- must be produced as fast as possible
- must be produced as cheap as possible
- must survive 200 years plus in the dirt long after the war is over, and still be safe for children to handle and play with

[m21sniper]

Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile

Cannonballs explode?

News to me. I always thought they were just projectiles - big heavy chunks of metal that were lobbed at enemy positions at high velocity because of expanding gas (being shot out of a cannon). I never realized they were themselves fragmentation weapons. Were they?

All the ones I've seen in museums just look like big spherical chunks of metal. No fuses or obvious places where an explosive charge would go. And how would it detonate anyway?

Yes, they explode.

Thank Dr.Schrapnel if you ever stumble accross him in the afterworld.

[m21sniper]

Originally Posted by svandamme

if it has live explosives in it, then it ain't bloody disarmed now is it?!

There is a difference between disarmed and inert.

[svandamme]

Originally Posted by m21sniper

There is a difference between disarmed and inert.

well, if you ask me , disarming , would mean, "to render harmless"
obviously there are levels of harmless
something that is harmless to a trained professional
might not be harmless in the hands of a hobbyist , or small child

so any bomb that is classified "disarmed" in a hobbyist context, should also be "inert"

[Jim Sims]

"From what I was told, there was absolutely nothing he had done wrong, that there was a manufacturing defect that no one would have known was there."


Apparently he was a retired UPS driver; not exactly the background (education and training) that would well prepare one to work with old, unstable ordinance. A man's gotta know his limitations otherwise reality will cruelly remind him.

[scottmandue]

On a side note,

I like to go hiking on the central Central coast of Calif. at a very large park named Montana De Oro... well turns out that land was previously own by the Army/Navy... and it also turns out the beaches along that part of the coast are very similar to certain beaches in Europe that we as Americans were very interested in back in the 1940's. Thus they did a lot of practice amphibious landings along that stretch of beach.
Last time I was up there they had a big sign saying "the Navy has done extensive searching to remove all munitions however is you see anything like this do not touch it and call this number immediately." They then had a long list of pictures showing some very nasty looking shells, grenades, etc.

[Joeaksa]

Originally Posted by m21sniper

There is a difference between disarmed and inert.

Thank You! It seems that there are several people on this thread who cannot read!

[svandamme]

i can get in my car, drive for less then 20 minutes, and i can come back with at least 10 unexploded, rusted out piece of WW1 shells...

Farmers have been busy the last few days plowing...
and what ever they plow up, they put to the side of the road
Dovo, the bombsquad does daily patrol's to collect them

that's just putting them to the side of the road... nobody here would think it's a smashing idea to start cleaning them up, let alone tamper with the fuses to disarm them...

[Komenda Fan]

Now imagine today's battlefields in 200 years time, still coated in depleted uranium...