So this is what a glitched demolitions test does. . . Options

[kzt]

"That's why you don't hear the words "amateur" and "EOD tech" in the same sentence very often."

It's fairly long, but the bright loud part is at 52 seconds.

I think that's about 15 pounds/7 kg of TNT in the round.

Also note how long it took for the dust to settle.

Raw URL http://www.liveleak.com/player2.swf?token=18f_1201000704

[mfb]

hahaha

[WearzManySkins]

Well it seems there is a new candidates for the Darwin Award of the year 2008.

I have "handled" 5" naval rounds, 155mm is even bigger.

WMS

[Whipstitch]

On a related topic, one of my players a few months back said this li'l gem: "Don't take Demolitions dude, you can default it."

I get giddy just thinking about the many ways things could eventually play out in the future.

[Malicant]

Demolitions FAIL! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotfl.gif)

[WearzManySkins]

A 5" (127 mm)Naval round weighs in a 75 pounds, with about 60 pounds of that is explosives IIRC, a 155 mm (6.1 inch) is a larger round, so a 155mm would weigh in at over 75 pounds and have more than 60 pounds of explosives. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif) Correction one source lists the 155mm as weighing 96 pounds.

I bet this video is being to used to train EOD and the Bomb Squad teams on what NOT to do. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

[Kanada Ten]

Sad.

[Erebus]

You may want to warn that its somewhat graphic.

[Galedeep]

Seriously, any time people are killed isn't a time for laughing and making jokes.

I mean, they obviously had no idea what they were doing, but even then. They died. Not funny.

[Malicant]

They were outside our monkeysphere, so yeah, it is funny, for us, kind of. In a very dark way.

[jago668]

I'd have to disagree. That was pretty amusing. Common sense tells you not to fuck with something that might have 80lbs of explosive in it. Hell if I toss a firecracker and it doesn't go off I don't mess with it, I just turn the water hose on it and leave it alone. Reminds me I need to send that link to a couple of friends of mine, show one of them the people he'll be working around in about a month.

[bibliophile20]

Can we have the context of the video? (i.e. location, general info, background, etc.)

EDIT:

Between what a friend of mine and I have determined (mostly him, but he's an ex-Army gunsmith), these were coalition boys in Iraq, the image was filmed using infrared, and the crater was in excess of 20 feet in diameter. Additionally, his theory is that, as there were no buildings or other targets around that would warrant an artillery round, the round was an air burster, programmed to detonate off the ground and scatter sub-munitions over an area (so they were basically trying to dig up a metal shell full of grenades). Also, air burster artillery rounds are notoriously finicky when it comes to the detonators, because the jolt of acceleration in the barrel can be too much, knocking contacts out of skew. His theory is, one of the guys slipped, which can been seen in that last viewable instant, and the jolt of his rifle barrel against the side of the round was enough to get the contact to close and the round to detonate.

So, yes, what we have here is a beautifully illustrated case of a quartet of human beings doing something incredibly stupid, with inadequate training and about the most inappropriate tools possible under the circumstances, making the topic perfectly named.

[Fix-it]

Can we have the context of the video? (i.e. location, general info, background, etc.)

second request for context.

also, I find this sad. land mines and car bombs in general are for the spineless.

[kzt]

Can we have the context of the video? (i.e. location, general info, background, etc.)

As best as I can determine, it's in Iraq, the guys who got blown up were actually on our side. (They give the map coords, but it would be a pain to try to find it.) Iraqi milita with a convoy to judge from the radio chatter. This seems to be from a airborne drone. I don't really know more.

There is said to be a fairly relaxed attitude towards safety in most of the Arab world. "Insha'Allah"

[KCKitsune]

You may want to warn that its somewhat graphic.

What is graphic about that video? You see the guys messing around with the ordinance and then *BOOM*. You don't see any body parts or anything gory. Those poor bastards were vaporized.

[Earlydawn]

Those were Iraqi army, no? I didn't watch it with audio.

[WearzManySkins]

Correction a 155 mm can contain up to 20 pounds of TNT/RDX explosives. Still more than enough to make body recovery a sponge job.

Since the source is from a web site that uses "Leaked" videos, unless you are current US Mil with strong connections to IRAQ the source and details be not be forthcoming.

An No it is not graphic,. like one has posted, you see them, big explosion/dust cloud, then no body parts are visible.

WMS

[kzt]

so a 155mm would weigh in at over 75 pounds and have more than 60 pounds of explosives. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif) Correction one source lists the 155mm as weighing 96 pounds.

Field Artillery rounds actually have a rather small percentage of explosives in them. I was serious in that a typical M107 155 round has a bit less than 15 pounds of TNT or CompB in it. I'd expect that it was an HE round, as a DPICM round is a base ejection round and the arming cycle is supposed to require deployment of the streamers on each grenade to arm the striker.

A little HE goes a LONG way. Much further then a certain game suggests. In the open a M107 has a lethal radius of 50 meters.

It's also possible that this was a larger IED, with the rest not seen until it exploded. I don't know. I was an artilleryman in the Army, I didn't blow craters in roads.

[WearzManySkins]

Agreed on the M107 but I also saw the stats on the M795, 23.8 lb of TNT and weighing approximately 103 pounds.

Now what a Iraqi Army 155mm stats are...*shrugs*

True I do not recall what types of artillery that was used under Sadam. It could have been a larger artillery round.

WMS

[kzt]

Iraq mostly used Warsaw Pact supplied artillery. 152mm is the typical medium round. Similar to NATO 155mm in characteristics. Artillery rounds are under huge stress in flight and have a lot of steel to keep them intact at 60,000g and 6000RPM. Modern rounds like the M795 use fancier steels and better designs to get more HE into the round IIRC. I think they also use a more powerful and yet more insensitive explosive.

[WearzManySkins]

Could have been a Warsaw Pact 203mm(8") projectile.

I have seen first hand what a 403mm (16") guns can do, the crater would have been larger. So it could have been a 203mm or a smaller shell with extra explosives packed in.

Wonder if the Iraqi insurgents are "cooking" the projectiles like what was done in VN, to get out the explosive and put into a more "usable" form.

WMS

[DocTaotsu]

I heard from an EOD tech about a year ago that they weren't, at least not on a broad scale. There's so many munitions lying around that it's easier for them to strap a bunch of them together to get a bigger blast.

Now the hairy parts of the Phillipines, they're evidently very sophisticated because they have less material to work with. They're also supposed to building much more complicated fuses and what not, homebrewing in some cases.

[kzt]

I've seen reports that suggest that the IED makers are running low on HE in some places. People making bombs of ANFO and such. We've blown up millions of pounds of old Iraqi ordinance and stockpiles in the last 4 years, eventually there are no more piles of artillery shells to use.

[DocTaotsu]

Than they'll have to turn to cooking... and that's probably not going to turn out very well for them for them in the short term. Nothing brings a smile to my face faster than the report that a bomb maker blew himself up.

[knasser]

A bit of warning that I was about to see four people die would have been appreciated.

There is said to be a fairly relaxed attitude towards safety in most of the Arab world. "Insha'Allah"

There are probably around 400 million arabs in the world today, and your "Insha'Allah" makes me think you're talking about muslims generally in which case we're talking over well over a billion. You're going to find plenty of accidents in any population that size, though of course the human mind is more given to forming opinions based on notable incidents rather than statistical analysis.

And given that this is Iraq, you might consider how many accidents you would see amongst the USA population if that country was turned into a warzone and littered with munitions. I'm sure (if you're in the USA and from the "our side" I assume you are) that you've come across plenty of people there who would be capable of harming themselves in a similar manner. The infrastructure, organisation and economy of Iraq has been devastated. In combination with the ongoing violence, I expect qualified bomb disposal experts aren't quickly available to a lot of the population. Without knowing the circumstances, how can we say anything about why they were doing what they were doing? Looking at the tracks either side it could easily be somewhere that someone may drive over. It could be at the bottom of someone's field for all I can tell. I don't know why they were digging it out, but maybe they felt it was their duty as soldiers to remove it before they moved on.

Who knows? But if these are adult Iraqi men then they're probably married, likely have children, all of which have just lost someone they loved and depended on. Whilst I understand why someone would say we can laugh at this because it's "outside our bubble," it's not outside mine. It's that "bubble," that ability to distance ourselves from people far away that allows factions in our countries to get away with waging wars like this. If people thought for a whlie about what just happened and what it means to these people, then more of us would have tried to prevent this war and maybe we'd have succeeded. That bubble is harmful to all of us.

I understand the purpose of dark humour, I really do. We need it to get us through our own grim situations or those of people we emphasize with. When we remove the empathy, the humour is no longer dark, it's just callous.

-K.