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The shrapnel thing really trips my "that doesn't seem right" intuition WRT how explosions work, unless those bins had some really unfortunate design features. I
by shantly 7y ago
The shrapnel thing really trips my "that doesn't seem right" intuition WRT how explosions work, unless those bins had some really unfortunate design features. I believe someone official may have said that at some point and it may have been picked up in popular culture as a reason, but it strikes me as kinda "truthy", pending more info—I'd expect a container of that sort, especially with a bit of a gap between most of it and the device, to tend to break into a small number of large pieces with terrible aerodynamics, much of it bound generally upward and slowing a ton before reaching human-height again (assuming the bins were fairly big and the bags/bombs tended to end up at the bottom or middle), making shrapnel that's at best (well, worst, but you know) very marginally more effective than the bomb sans same shrapnel, if at all. Shrapnel that's big (tending to strike over a large surface area) and rapidly-slowing is fairly useless shrapnel.
The explanation that they were a good place to hide a largish bag so no-one would get suspicious about them seems entirely sufficient to explain why they were used, and why it might be a good idea to remove/disable them and replace them with something you can see the inside of.
- buro9 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrington_bombings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrington_bombings > The area was crowded with shoppers. Witnesses said that shoppers fled from the first explosion into the path of the second. It was later found that the bombs had been placed inside cast-iron litter bins, causing large amounts of shrapnel https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1991/feb/19/northernireland.duncancampbell https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1991/feb/19/northernireland.d... > Forty minutes later, a bomb hidden in a litter bin on the main concourse at Victoria exploded as police were carrying out a search, and while the rush hour was at its height. > The dead man, a commuter, was the father of a 16-month-old child. He was killed by a shrapnel wound to the chest https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/two-young-boys-murdered-ira-12216451 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/two-young-boys-murdere... > Hundreds of pieces of cast iron shrapnel from two litter bins, which had been blasted apart by Semtex, littered the shopping precinct
- shantly 7y agoAh. Yeah, thick-enough cast iron might do it. Doesn't break fast enough. [EDIT] I mean I guess I hadn't counted on the bins so strongly resembling actual bomb casings. Heh. Yeesh, that sucks. [EDIT EDIT] doesn't break fast enough and is brittle. I was thinking something like sheet steel.
- jandrese 7y agoThe bin became shrapnel, but I have to wonder how it compares to a pressure cooker full of nuts, bolts, and nails in terms of shrapnel production?