Er, Guys? If you pull explosive ordnance of any sort out of a river, do not drag it out of the water, do not pose with it for photographs and definitely do NOT bounce it miles across country in the back of your pickup. Call the authorities - explosives and rocket propellants aren't especially stable to start with, they get less stable with time and some of them don't react well to water.

There aren't so many RPG's round here, but there are several ordance disposal areas in the North Sea east of here. We regularly get news reports of fishermen (small trawlers, usually) dragging up WWII naval mines - that's about 2 tons of 60 year old hi-ex!

Yes. Hi-ex == bad, do not touch, leave alone! Assume you just set off the broken timer and run away!

Don't they still occasionally dig up a Nazi bomb when working in London? Makes excavations a little more exciting that usual I'd wager.

Yes, they still still dig up bombs (and other odds and ends like grenades and artillery shells that people kept as souvenirs), but the Nazi's bombers weren't really suitable for strategic bombing (they focussed on close support, which is a very different mission). For example the He-111 loaded its bombs vertically, so the largest bomb it could carry was 500lb, quite a different propect to a naval mine.

There's a nice 999 which tells the story of a bomb they found in the foundations of a gas holder. For those of you who aren't familiar with these things, what you've got is a set (usually three) of nested steel cylinders, may be 30 meters in diameter, with the top one closed. These date from the days of 'town gas', a rather hazardous mixture of hydrogen, carbon monoxide etc produced by cooking coal in anerobic conditions (the other product is coke, of course, which is used in making steel). Town gas was used for domestic lighting before the introduction of the electric light bulb, and has since been replaced by methane, which is obviously much safer. The gas holders allowed the storage of reasonable amounts of gas at atmospheric pressure. I'm not sure exactly how they work, but the steel cylinders float on a large pool of water in the base, forming what's effectively a large bubble.

Anyway, what appears to have happened is that during an air-raid one of these gas holders was hit, but the bomb didn't fuse. They patched up the hole in the top of the gas holder and forgot about the bomb (there were other, more pressing things going on at the time).

During the late '80's they were inspecting this gas holder and they found the bomb buried in the concrete foundations. It's under several feet of very murky water, which you can't drain because it's part of the structure of the gas holder.

So the bomb squad arrive and cart all their gear in through the airlock (the gas holder was inflated with air for the inspection, not enough pressure to cause compression sickness, but not open access, either). They have to dive off a small inflatable dingy anchored to ropes stretched across the water.

The fuse on these bombs is an aluminium cylinder filled with fulminate of mercury crystals (or perhaps it was lead azide by then?). The book says to 'innoculate' the fuse before moving the bomb. Innoculation means drilling through the aluminium casing with a hand drill and then filling the fuse with water to stabillise the crystals. Except this bomb is buried in a concrete wall, under water, in a gas holder.

They ended up having to drag the bomb out of its crater and then suspended it from their boat with just the fuse plate above the water before they could innoculate it and make it safe to handle. They then cut a big hole in the bomb and use a steam cleaner to wash out the main charge. If I recall correctly, only at that point could they actually remove the bomb from the gas holder.

They have the same problem in Germany too, of course, but with the much bigger bombs carried by Lancs, Forts and Liberators.

Remind me not to volunteer for the "bomb squad"!