July 21,
2008: For the second time this year, a
Cold War era Russian ammunition deport caught fire and exploded, with the
mayhem going on for days. On July 10th, the old Soviet military base in
Uzbekistan, bear the city of Bukhara, caught fire and began exploding. Windows
were shattered in Bukhara, even though it is 12 kilometers from the depot.
There were hundreds of casualties, and apparently the fires are still burning.
Poor
Russian ammo storage practices have led to a major loss of expensive missiles
two months ago, on May 23rd, at an airbase 250 kilometers northeast of St
Petersburg, Russia. A fire in a missile storage facility there, led to the
destruction of nearly 500 air-to-air missiles. For over an hour, nearby
civilians could see and hear explosions, including several missiles which flew
skyward and landed outside the base.
Since the
end of the Cold War, there have been several known accidents in Russian
designed missile storage areas. Each time, it was apparently poor layout and
management of the sites which caused the problem. Many existing munitions
storage sites still have the poor layout, and lax practices of the Soviet era.
The list
of known disasters is long. Three years ago, in the Kamchatka Peninsula, at the
main naval base of the Pacific Fleet, a
fire broke out in an ammo depot. Like many other Cold War era ammo depots, this
one contained large quantities of very old ammunition. In this case, thousands
of shells were stacked in the open, in preparation of destroying them. Somehow
a fire broke out, and hundreds of these shells exploded. Some 4,000 local
civilians were evacuated.
In 2004,
an ammunition storage depot in Ukraine went up in flames, accompanied by
massive explosions. Eleven years ago, a major ammunition depot in Siberia
caught fire, and thousands of tons of ammo burned and exploded. But hundreds of
tons of grenades, shells, and bulk explosives were blown clear of the area. For
years, local civilians have been collecting this stuff, and selling it to
criminals. A year later, another Siberian depot exploded, sending some shells
flying for over ten kilometers. Several local civilians were killed.
The worst
of these disasters occurred in 1984, when the main ammo depot of the Soviet
northern fleet went up, destroying so many missiles that the fleet was
critically short of munitions, and not
combat ready, for six months.
The end of
the Cold War left millions of tons of military weapons, equipment and
ammunition scattered all over the Soviet Union. Nearly half of the Soviet Union
turned into 14 new nations, when the union dissolved in 1991. All Soviet
military gear sitting in those new nations, when the split became effective,
now owned that stuff. These new nations could not afford to take care of all
this military material, nor dispose of it safely. Some was sold, but there was
no market for much of it. So there is sits, waiting to burn and explode. Russia
and some Western nations are contributing cash and expertise to get rid of the
most dangerous items. But this takes times, and frequently, the local
government does not cooperate (they want a bribe, or to be paid for the
destroyed goods, or are simply paranoid).