Good mood to you, dear readers of our blog.
I came across a news item that scrap metal collectors were detained in the Ryazan region. Like this? What did they do? People were simply collecting scrap metal that no one needed. Count the trash.
This is all true, of course, but citizens collected scrap metal in the area where artillery depots burned last year. And, there was a lot of ammunition left around the area that had not yet been found. Judging by the fact that the detained citizens got off with only a fine of 5 thousand rubles. detained them before they could find anything explosive.
And then, I wondered, were there any cases when citizens handed over ammunition, mines or other dangerous objects to scrap metal collection points? It turned out that there are really many examples of such cases, so I decided to make a small selection of the most interesting stories.
General group of typical examples. Indeed, there are a lot of notes on practically typical cases on the Internet. When citizens brought, brought, dragged shells, mines and other ammunition to scrap collection points. Thank God all these examples ended happily. The receivers on the spot called the police (militia), they called the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the sappers took the shell to a landfill or a vacant lot and detonated it there.
And, out of all this general heap of typical examples, I liked one story. In 2013, in the Astrakhan region, a pensioner brought an artillery shell weighing 50 kg to a scrap metal collection point. The receptionist called the local police officer, following the scheme described above. The district police officer began to figure out where the grandmother could have gotten this shell? And the ammunition was modern. The grandmother said that she found it in a trash bin near the road. But I forgot the place. We decided to check all the local landfills and found that, purely theoretically, the pensioner could have found this shell at a landfill that was located 40 kilometers from the village where there was a scrap metal collection point. In this case, it turned out that the grandmother was dragging a 50-kilogram projectile across the steppe on a duffel cart. The pensioner herself denied this, but who knows.
Bomb at a pipe factory. In 2000, workers at the Volga pipe plant discovered an artillery shell in a load of scrap metal. The cargo came from Astrakhan, but that’s not the point. Why exactly did this note interest me? It turns out, and I didn’t know this, scrap metal goes through multiple inspection systems before being sent for melting. This includes checking gas analyzers to detect explosives. Therefore, the workers at the plant themselves were surprised not by the fact of a bomb in a cargo of scrap metal, but by why three levels of inspection of the cargo did not notice the shell. As experts from the Ministry of Emergency Situations assured, in the event of an explosion of this bomb, the radius of destruction would be one kilometer.
Strange aerial bomb. 2018, the city of Vyatskie Polyany, Kirov region, workers at a scrap metal collection point were sawing a rusty iron pipe, when suddenly technical fluid flowed and the fuse delay mechanism was triggered. There was no explosion, but only God knows what the workers had to endure at that moment (everything is ghostly in this raging world).
Sappers from the Ministry of Emergency Situations arrived when called. It was determined that the “pipe” was an aerial bomb. The total weight of the bomb was 500 kilograms. The ammunition was taken to the training ground and detonated. After inspection, it turned out that the bomb was deactivated. That is, it did not contain explosives.
Citizens who scrapped the bomb were interviewed. They testified that they found the bomb in the forest in an upright position, partially buried in the ground. That is, the bomb fell from a great height. Unfortunately, there is no information about what kind of bomb it was, and how it could have ended up where the residents of a nearby village found it.
Decommissioned missiles. A more serious case occurred in Chita in the summer of 2017. In the industrial zone of the city, on the territory of a scrap metal collection point, an explosion occurred. As a result of the incident, two employees of the point were killed and one was hospitalized with serious injuries.
The moment of the explosion was captured by the video recorder camera
As the investigation established, the explosion occurred when workers were cutting the body of the S-200 Angara missile with a gas torch. While clearing the rubble, investigators discovered two more missiles. It was not possible to establish when, how exactly and under what circumstances the decommissioned missiles ended up at the scrap metal collection point.
Investigative Committee employees at the site of a rocket explosion
The fact is that this type of anti-aircraft missiles was removed from service with the Russian army in 1992. The exploded rocket, judging by the numbers, had expired and should have been disposed of ten years before the incident. Information about what was established during the investigation is not publicly available on the Internet.
How the population of Sevastopol was evacuated. This story also has a tragic context, although it definitely deserves a Darwin Award nomination. In 2004, on the outskirts of Sevastopol, a small explosion occurred in a private garage. As a result, two people died on the spot, and a third had both arms amputated. As it turned out, three employees of the Kalchuk company, which collects scrap metal, lifted a WWII-era bottom mine from the bottom of Kamyshovaya Bay. The weight of the mine is almost a ton, while the weight of the explosive is 650 kilograms.
This is a very interesting mine from a technological point of view. In Soviet times, a separate feature film was even made about her. The Germans bombed the bay of Sevastopol, the mines lay on the bottom and were activated by the sound of the ship's engine running, after which they floated up and exploded according to a magnetic sensor.
This mine has several degrees of protection for mine clearance. Therefore, when citizens decided to dismantle the mine and look for non-ferrous metal there, the protection worked and two people died. Yes, friends, the mine lay on the bottom of the sea for 60 years and the protection mechanism worked.
In general, after long meetings, employees of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Ukraine decided to remove the mine outside the city. It was impossible to blow it up on the spot, otherwise, according to calculations, it would sweep away a couple of blocks. The mine was loaded onto a vehicle, having previously evacuated 13,000 people. Along the route of the car with the mine, all sources of radio signals, electricity and even water supply with gas were turned off. Having arrived at the test site, the sappers no longer tempted fate and detonated the bomb along with the KAMAZ on which the mine was brought.
These are sad, but instructive examples. So, I sincerely wish everyone who works as a ferrous metal cop to be careful and vigilant.
