Three rusting masts rise from the Thames Estuary, off Sheppy Island, not far from Sheerness. They are the masts that once supported the swinging booms on the Liberty ship USS Richard Montgomery, which sank with a cargo of high explosive bombs and other munitions in 1944. The wreck still contains an estimated 1,400 tonnes of potentially highly volatile explosives. The remaining munitions are too dangerous to remove and also too dangerous to ignore. 

Now, the Ministry of Defence is offering to pay £5 million ‘danger money’ to any company prepared to hack off the rusting masts of the ship that the BBC has referred to as the “ticking time bomb of the Thames.” The concerns are that the rusting masts could waste away and fall onto the munitions, potentially causing a detonation.

As we posted last year, the Royal Military College of Science warned in 1970 that if the remaining bombs blew up, the force of the explosion would create a 3,000 meter-high column of water and a five meter-high tidal wave would swamp Sheerness and its 11,000 residents and travel up the Thames. 

For most of the intervening period since the ship sank, the strategy has been to monitor the condition of the wreck and its dangerous cargo, rather than attempt to raise the high explosives in the 9,000 shells and bombs still believed to be in the ship’s holds. 

A previous attempt to salvage a similar ship did not end well.  When an attempt was made, in 1967, to salvage the munitions ship, Kielce, which sank in the English Channel off Folkstone, there was an explosion equivalent to an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale, digging a 20-foot-deep (6 m) crater in the seabed and bringing “panic and chaos” to Folkestone.  Fortunately, no one was injured in the blast.

Thanks to David Rye for contributing to this post.