• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Sharp-eyed digger driver

RogerS

RogerS

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And off to pastures new
One of my nephews is having some work done on his house, extension etc. My sister sent me some photos that he took last week. Full of blue lights, Hi-Viz jackets and most important of all, an olive green vehicle with “Bomb Disposal” on the side.

Yup, the digger driver spotted it. Load of folk evacuated while the pro’s got stuck in. It was still live, apparently.
 
That must have been a real scare. Imagine stuff like that laying in the ground next to your house all the time you were living there... :eek:
 
Not quite as scary but a digger operator, preparing some foundations in the garden of a house at the top of our street, spotted a 3ph cable just 300mm below the surface. It had no right to be there, was supposed to be in the road, supplying the whole street. He spotted it before the big blue flash brown trouser moment fortunately.
 
Duncan A said:
Not quite as scary but a digger operator, preparing some foundations in the garden of a house at the top of our street, spotted a 3ph cable just 300mm below the surface. It had no right to be there, was supposed to be in the road, supplying the whole street. He spotted it before the big blue flash brown trouser moment fortunately.
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Lucky for him he had eagle eyes. Not so Alistair, the digger operator working on our last place. He was carrying out some work at RAF Spadeadam and they'd showed him the map and diagrams saying where the very large cable was. It wasn't. Instead an hour or so later it appeared skewered on the end of his bucket. He had the presence of mind to jump clear rather than climb down.
 
That reminds me of a little incident when I were a lad.

I liked science and I loved magic. I ended up on the telly in 1975 and was semi-pro for nearly 30 years.

In the theatrical world, we have something called Flash Paper. It is tissue paper impreganted with a highly flammable substance. I don't know what they use now, but back then it was sodium chlorate, widely available as a weedkiller. I doubt you could buy it today.

We had a floor-standing boiler in what used to be the coalhouse. It was always warm in there.

So I bought a quire (!) of tissue paper from Longton market, I don't know where I got the weedkiller, but I mixed it up good and strong and hung the soaked tissue paper on a makeshift drying line over the boiler. My parents had no idea what I was doing. It dried out and I kept it in a plastic bag, IIRC.

It worked really well. I could roll a small piece up in insert it into my exploding magic wand (.22 blank) and it would go off with a very satisfying flash-bang-wallop, especially if it was holding a thimbleful of very environmentally unfriendly glitter (that somebody else had to clean up).

Oh how we laughed.

I was very lucky indeed that I didn't set fire to the house, or worse.

I regret selling my magic wand.
S
 
Talking of unexploded bombs, my in-laws had a similar experience which resulted in one end of their street being closed for 3 weeks late last year. They (and we when over there at my wife's place) are close to Köln, which the RAF targeted quite heavily back in the day. Unexploded ordinance is occasionally discovered. This one was 15 feet down and right beneath a crossroads. It was discovered when they were replacing foundations for an adjacent railway crossing.
 
Unexploded ordinance is so abundant here that nearly every construction project with substantial excavation requires a UXO survey. I was in Aschaffenburg when this bomb exploded in October 2006. Apparently, the equipment operator hit the bomb several times before it detonated. In 2014, the experts were called to conduct a controlled detonation of this 1,000 pound bomb on the A3 near Frankfurt.
 
Mike said:
Unexploded ordinance is so abundant here that nearly every construction project with substantial excavation requires a UXO survey. I was in Aschaffenburg when this bomb exploded in October 2006. Apparently, the equipment operator hit the bomb several times before it detonated. In 2014, the experts were called to conduct a controlled detonation of this 1,000 pound bomb on the A3 near Frankfurt.
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I seem to recall from listening to Al Murray’s podcast on WW2 that 70,000 tonnes of bombs were dropped on the UK compared with 1,400,000 dropped on Germany.
 
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