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My Life as a Teenage Juggernaut... (Worm AU x Marvel)

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Kryslin said:
An air horn sounded three times, its blasts sounding muted as if at a great distance. With that, she gave the already taut wire rope a good hard yank. With a loud crunch, the interior support beams came out and she started collecting the now slack wire rope. The roof structure began creaking and groaning before succumbing to gravity, its rusted framing giving way and collapsing.
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That sounds incredibly Familiar...but shouldn't the girls have been wearing hi-vis vests? OSHA regs, you know...
 
Kryslin said:
WW2 era explosives that were Abandoned In Place because they were too dangerous to move. Specifically, Pictratol (blend of Ammonium Picrate and TNT). Improperly disposed of Ammonium Picrate is still an issue along stretches of Atlantic coastline; if you see what appears to be a rusty looking rock... don't touch it. Picric Acid based explosives tend to become unstable as they react with moisture, salt, etc.
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Oh, God, and I thought the cocaine powder bomb idea was bad! This is the sort of thing that annihilated a large amount of Texas City, TX when the Grandcamp blew and given an additional 50+ years to become ever more unstable, scratch ignition, the only surprise is that cars driving past the building didn't detonate that pile of boom, the vibrations of staving in the floor would do it for sure.
 
The explosion isn't going to do any damage to Taylor and Co., but I'm pretty sure it's big enough to set off some panic in the city before word gets out. Hopefully there was a small amount, or the damage is gonna be to a lot more than just the one building. I've seen lots of pictures from the Halifax explosion.
 
It could've been an ancient Acetylene Tank that just wasn't properly recorded. Those things are helluva dangerous to the surrounding environment. I actually have personal experience with this as about 500 meters from my house there was an abandoned truck yard that had one which detonated during a fire. The explosion was pretty spectacular.
 
Wordz of Krys say it was decidedly lost and forgotten WWII munitions. With the disruptions of just about everything including record-keeping, it's honestly not that inexplicable.
 
GreydonCreed said:
Which begs the question, "How do you forget something like that?!?!"
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Considering the timeperiod, all filing would be paper. One fire in the wrong place would destroy the info and lose the location easily, especially if everyone who knew about it was dead.
Of course, it could have just been misfiled. That's far too easy to do, especially if the place changed owners.
Barghest Blue said:
They probably don't read the thread, at least not before they post, and maybe not after either
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Almost certainly; I've seen it done a number of times
 
Barghest Blue said:
They probably don't read the thread, at least not before they post, and maybe not after either
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PhoebusArtemis said:
Considering the timeperiod, all filing would be paper. One fire in the wrong place would destroy the info and lose the location easily, especially if everyone who knew about it was dead.
Of course, it could have just been misfiled. That's far too easy to do, especially if the place changed owners.

Almost certainly; I've seen it done a number of times
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I needed reminding myself, so yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loaves you, yeah, yeah, yeah,
and with a love like that, you know you should be glad... - padding provided by the Beatles.
 
Since the detonation is below ground level, the resulting shockwave would have been directed upward at a bit of an angle. That should localize damage to the immediate surroundings instead of a ground level burst and shockwave traveling horizontally. Still gonna cause a hell of a mess though, especially debris scatter after a rather energetic launch. And a boom heard citywide.

Spectacular was a good way to describe it.
 
A brief explanation:

In the late 30's (as lend-lease was getting under way) The more military areas were kept away from the civilian facilities, and Brockton Bay was a much smaller city. It was mainly used as a staging point for freighters heading north to Halifax to join a convoy, but the US Navy had a small station there, mainly for some older destroyers and destroyer escorts for anti-sub work.

During that time, the USN was switching from ammonium picrate (Dunnite) to Picratol (Ammonium Picrate & TNT) because Dunnite was not completely shock insensitive, with shells detonating on impact with a surface instead of after penetrating (if they were AP rounds). There were issues with it deteriorating and becoming unstable when exposed to atmospheric moisture.

This lot had been awaiting storage when a storm hit, and the boxes containing the explosives - 20 US tons of it - were damaged and exposed to the elements. Now unusable, the boxes were carefully dried, sealed in paraffin, and carefully removed to a site further away from the city and docks as they existed in 1944, and entombed it in concrete, then built a building over it, and used it for storage of other things.

Then the war ended, and the old warehouse was cordoned off with a security fence on government property.

It took a couple of incidents in the 1950's and 1960's, one at Kittery (a fire) and one in Boston (records misfiled, then shredded), to lose any record of what was under the building. The property was sold to the Brockton Bay Dockworkers Association, who used it for tackle and rigging storage up until the riots. After the riots, use of the building dwindled to nothing, and it was eventually left to sit empty. A couple of fires during and after the riots and substantially weakened the concrete over the explosives, such that a 200 lbs. support beam hitting it from 20 ft. up end on would penetrate and strike a box with enough force to initiate a detonation.

The end result of 40,000 lbs of picratol going off will launch the concrete slab into the air in chunks, along with demolishing the surrounding buildings. Vista had already had an area 2 miles (3.2km) centered on the building in question warped to contain debris, and because the math for a sphere is much less complex than that of a cube, cone, or cylinder (yes, they exist. Quartic equations are not for the mathematically weak of heart), the warped area goes into the air, too. A bit of adrenaline might double that distance.

It will probably annoy Taylor, will have all sorts of unhappy federal officials running around scared, and the DWA trying to find out what might be under other buildings from that era.

What surprises me is no one caught the jellybean discussion.
 
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