The travel blogosphere is buzzing with the reports that World War 2 explosives — cannon shells ranging in size from 20-milimeter to 90mm — have been turning up under Seattle’s Pier 91, where cruise ships dock.
Officials are busily assuring the public that there is “no immediate danger” from these lethal leftovers. Opinions vary, but I do know this: Most explosives do not become kinder and gentler with age. They only get more unstable.
For more on this story from USA Today, click here.
Meanwhile, should people avoid taking a cruise into or out of Seattle? Not really.
Why? Because the reality is that many of us, whether we know it or not, have been living around explosives all our lives.
All across America, there are suburbs and public facilities built on the site of former military bases where live explosives were handled, fired…and left behind. Aerial bombs and artillery shells that failed to explode buried themselves in the ground as “duds.” Shells rolled off piers or from the decks of ships and buried themselves in the muck below. Quantities of unused munitions that sit for decades.
Taken altogether, they’re referred as “UXO” — unexploded ordnance. Until they’re located and rendered harmless by some very skilled and incredibly courageous people, how long they remain unexploded is largely up to chance.
Before such lands get turned over to local communities, military engineers and explosives technicians sweep the grounds and sweep them again with incredibly painstaking care, so leftover explosives seldom become an issue.
But hunting for explosives, like hunting for landmines, is a tricky, inexact business. Decades of floods, sediment, tidal action, erosion can bury old explosives, move them around, expose them unexpectedly, leaving them to be found by children at play — or jostled by a docking cruise ship.
In my own city, children were killed when they found and played with a dud shell from WW2. Their neighborhood had been built on a former tank gunnery range that had been swept multiple times.
(We’re just talking here about the old, left-over, unaccounted for explosives. We won’t even bring up the volumes of live military munitions are routinely move across the country by truck, train or aircraft.)
Meanwhile, our experience with UXO pales in comparison with other parts of the world that have been subjected to years of warfare.
In Europe, they still find live bombs and shells now and then — from both world wars. In Southeast Asia, farmers’ plows still sometimes set off explosives left over from the Vietnam conflict. In African countries like Angola, the struggle to clear out all the mines left in the ground is expected to last for decades.
The threat of UXO is real enough, but let’s face it. We daily share roads with trucks hauling thousands of gallons of gasoline, pull into gas stations storing many thousands more, and drive past massive oil refineries — all of which likely have many times the explosive power of what currently lies beneath Pier 91.
And we do it without a second thought.
The day may yet come when nations decide to stop using explosives to settle their disagreements and we won’t have to deal with situations like this anymore. Until then, life goes on — man-made hazards and all.