Yeah, that was just plain stupidity. Broke all the range rules of NEQ's permitted on the range and got in a power of shit for setting off 6 claymores all banked together with det cord. One was the stated max permitted. And on a cloudy day just makes it a whole lot worse. Certainly didn't help their reputation for sure.
Cloud makes things really bad, as it reflects the explosive shock wave back to the ground, bounces off, hits the cloud, bounces down etc etc etc.
We blew up a 5 tonne WWII aerial bomb dropped on Japanese warships hiding up the Mekong river. It missed and buried itself in the clay banks of the Mekong, only to turn up 60 years later in a clay pit for a brick making plant on the outskirts of Phnom Pehn. We set it off 18 km away from the capital, in a shallow hole. No one down town heard a thing.
A fortnight later we had a weird heat/cloud inversion thing happen. The team were setting off tiny basic charges, about the size of a couple of bic lighters. 70 guys on the basic deminers course, so 70 lots of these tiny charges going off sporadically. But the sound bounced off the clouds, all the 18km back into town and caused pandemonium, as it sounded just like mortars being fired. 5 tonne vs 50 grams. Sound can do weird things.
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