history · 27 November 1944 · 80 years ago
A mistake by an armourer at an underground bomb dump at Hanbury, near Burton-on-Trent, England, United Kingdom triggered a massive explosion as 4,000 tons of bombs went off at once. The blast instantly gouged a 12 acre hole in the ground and the tremors were picked up by seismolograph in Geneva, Switzerland and Casablanca, French Morocco. Forty people were killed in the blast, by falling debris or by suffocation trapped underground. The blast caused a nearby reservoir to collapse and six million gallons of rubble-filled water poured down into the bomb dump, killing 27 men working in the offices on the surface. The blast represented only 10 percent of the explosives in the dump. If the lot had gone off, it would have cause a bigger explosion than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Today there is still a crater a quarter-mile wide and 100 feet deep at the site which is sealed off because of the unexploded bombs still lying beneath the surface.
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