Wreck of SS Montgomery on the Thames

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buffnut453

Captain
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Jul 25, 2007
Cambridgeshire, England
Just saw this article and thought it might interest a few folk here, not least because of the 3D models that have been created of the ship. The SS Montgomery was beached in 1944 with a cargo of explosives that was never removed. The masts appear above the River Thames and have become something of a draw for people wanting to see a genuine WW2 relic on the Thames. However, the masts are becoming unstable, and the fear is that their collapse might trigger an explosion of the cargo.

Here's the article for any who are interested:

 
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I lived close to Southend and you can see the masts quite clearly at low tide. It's funny how people get used to living next to a literal time bomb.

The logic that you check the cargo on a regular basis to see if the explosives are unstable and then not do anything I could never understand. So what happens if you check the cargo and find the explosives are unstable, what then, try to move unstable explosives?
 
I lived close to Southend and you can see the masts quite clearly at low tide. It's funny how people get used to living next to a literal time bomb.

The logic that you check the cargo on a regular basis to see if the explosives are unstable and then not do anything I could never understand. So what happens if you check the cargo and find the explosives are unstable, what then, try to move unstable explosives?
Caught between a rock and a hard place really.

Do nothing and hope/pray nothing happens.
Do something and risk triggering an explosion.

The latter method was tried in the 1960s with another shipwreck from 1946 with less explosives involved. But using explosives on it was perhaps not the best option!

I love the quote on a Wiki from the MCA that "doing nothing [was] not an option for much longer". And that was 21 years ago! Or nearly 25% of the time she has been lying there quite peacefully slowly rotting away. But if the ship is slowly disintegrating then so are the bomb casings, which must make moving them difficult.

Sometimes in life the best option is just to do nothing and let nature take its course.
 

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