An example of how one incident can mean chaos for hundreds of thousands.
At 3 AM last night someone on the Army camp next to the A1 at Catterick heard and reported a loud explosion, Civvy police responded and closed the A1 in both directions just south of Scotch corner.
Now at 18.45 hours some 15 hours later the A1 is still closed and the road network in this area is in absolute chaos. much traffic has been redirected onto the A19 chaos very slow traffic up the coast but the rest has been diverted onto small local roads in an effort to get around the closure. 44 tonners ended up on farm tracks and down 6 ft wide country lanes, gridlock in tiny villages, vehicles going round in circles for hours.
i have been wondering WTF is going on......but they seem to keeping the wraps on it....i wonder what they will come up with .....or if you like what cover storey will end up as.
Abandoned detonators apparently. Because obviously people have massive amounts of those just lying around
My mistake. The detonators were conveniently found & destroyed by bomb disposal teams but "were unlikely" to have caused the explosion.
Are they still finding Jerry UXBs? When I was in Italy a few years ago they excavated one in the small town where we were searching for an old B24 crash site and we found more nearby which had been jettisoned before the a/c crashed. Carabinieri and EOD from the Alpini Regt were a great bunch of blokes and helped us stay out of trouble on the dig, sweeping with their ground oenetrating radar, etc.
Part of the trouble around huge chunks of North Yorks and South Durham is 100 years ago and 70 years ago almost every village around here had an army camp in this area, The DLI alone had 55 Battalions in WW1 all with camps, training areas etc. On top of that millions of TA reservists and Cadets along with Home Guard Units have also been using the area and most of them would have been using / hiding caches and ammo dumps often improvised and sometimes forgotten.
Move to 2014 and not only are the villages growing with new estates going up everywhere, but also the Army is more than doubling the size of bases and depots in the Garrison, so loads of dozers are digging up huge swathes of land and disturbing long forgotten munitions.
Also along the NER and LNER / ECML during WW1 we had huge improvised munitions plants built right next to the railways to provide ammo for the front line, a lot of that was often stored outside and occasionally forgotten.
But just one loud bang left much of the NE gridlocked in North Yorks for over 14 hours, highlighting again the issue with trying to bug out.
when I lived in the cottage on Dartmoor(mid 1980s) went out for the day with my(then) wife when we came back the bomb squad were all over the cottage next door, guy had been renovating it and had found old sticks of dynamite from the previous owner.
(9 December 2014, 22:21)NorthernRaider Wrote: [ -> ]Look at this bloody mess to re-enforce the difficulty in bugging out in the UK
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...three.html
I think this just reinforces what BP and myself were saying earlier this year about any kind of mass evacuation from the South East to other parts of the country being completely unrealistic, and today's issues were caused with 'normal' midweek traffic numbers, not any kind of evacuation or bug out!
Yup, Ice, snow, fog, wood smoke, crash, VOSA check, Speed check , over turned caravan, jack knifed tuck, horses on road, protestors, cyclists, farm vehicles, mud, fallen trees, blocked drains, subsidence, flood, tourists, special events, rush hour, diversions, road works, traffic census, land slide, refugees, military movements, industrial accidents near the road, you name it everything is loaded against VEHICULAR bugging out and pedestrian bugging out means you can carry very little to sustain a family.
Aside from all the unintentional blockages, you have to consider that the inhabitants of rural areas will soon notice people arriving and might decide to block the roads deliberately. It wouldn't be difficult.