Military Ordinance dumps in Gulf of Mexico

[Edelweiss]

Any of you folks living around the Gulf been hearing about this? I knew we had ordinance dumps off shore, even here in Puget Sound, but a little more disturbing what kind of ordinance you have there, 1000 lb Mustard Gas. Some of it appears to be at relatively shallow depths.

The military carried out the dumping from 1946 to 1970 — including off the Pacific, Atlantic and Hawaii coasts — so it's no secret. But now that some of the containers used to store the munitions are more than 60 years old, the researchers say it's time to see them as a threat.

"The bottom line is that these bombs are a threat today and no one knows how to deal with the situation," Texas A&M oceanographer William Bryant said in a statement ahead of a briefing he'll give at a weapons disposal conference. "If chemical agents are leaking from some of them, that’s a real problem. If many of them are still capable of exploding, that’s another big problem."

The full story is here:

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/201...f-mexico-need-to-be-checked-experts-warn?lite

 

[Steve]

The crabs don't seem to mind.
Steve W

 

[ben2go]

Kind of a scary to think that some of us have been floating over this stuff.

 

[Blue Heron]

I dont worry about it too much. Plenty of Hurricanes have buried and un buried UXO. They wash up on beaches every couple of years. The Mustard Gas or other Chemicals, are usually inert and destablized due to the corrosion. Gasses dont do well in liquid water, and they lose the concentrate if they did leak. I woul dbe more concerned with the lost Nuke Bomb that was jettisoned in the 50's in a Bay in Georgia.. a tourist recently found 12 Civil War Cannon Balls without the fuses in a sand dune here on NAS Pensacola after Hurricane Issac.. EOD called them good and they are now being preserved for the Gulf Island National Seashore Park.

 

[Edelweiss]

The Savannah nuclear bomb is certainly a concern!! Although the military claims there is no danger of a thermonuclear detonation, the idea of an undisclosed amount of Uranium and Plutonium laying at the bottom of a shallow water bay near a US city is troubling. I suppose they may eventually recover it, once the weapons case corrodes away and exposes the radioactive materials to water.

According to the MSDS sheets, the Mustard gas bombs in this case are phosgene which is deadly in concentrate at atmospheric pressure. It does decompose when exposed to water. Unfortunately, the reaction releases Hydrogen Chloride and Carbon Monoxide also toxic gases. Underwater they're probably fine, exposed to the atmosphere on the deck of a shrimp boat or work boat would be another story.

 

[psneeld]

Darggers have been pulling up ordinance in their nets for years in the northeast..mostly torpedoes (I guess U-boat duds)...

We used to fly EOD people from FT Dix to a beach not far north of Atlantic City every time a Nor'easter would uncover a bunch of WWII bombs in the sand dunes...most were duds but some live ones were/are still uncovered every storm.

Cracked me up when the environmentalists used to come unglued when we would land a helo on the beach.... but never seemed too concerned about one of the birdwatchers setting off a bomb up in the sand dunes where all the birds nested anyway....