What is the explosive area/radius (damage) caused by a 60 mm and an 81 mm Viet-Nam era mortar shells respectively.
I ask this because 250 60 mm and eight 81 mm mortar shells were found (Explosive intact) buried on Cape Cod Massachusetts. They have found other caches in the past, WW1 era all the way to Viet-Nam, buried by the military on what is now a closed military base.
I am sure they will find chemical weapons eventually. So, what happens when a find of this size detonates? Could it set-off other, undiscovered caches?
Where abouts on the Cape did they uncover these? If it was at Otis AFB, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. They find unexploded ordinance there all the time. Enough that at a brush fire there, they told us “stay here and wait for the fire to come to you.” “Why?” “Because there are a bunch of bombs and shells over there.” Ok, we’ll stay right here then.
Getting back to the OP, though, from my limited experience with military ordinance, I wouldn’t worry about them detonating. Three years ago the pieces of a house being dismantled in Lawrence ended up at a recycling place in Rochester. The workers there noticed shells inside the pile, so they called the fire department. The Mass. State Police “Hazardous Devices Section” (what the rest of us call the bomb squad) spent the next week there removing old military explosives. And none of it went boom. There is so much stuff buried at Otis, if it hasn’t gone boom yet, I don’t think it would be a problem. Now, the huge amounts of fuel that they dumped into the ground over the past 40 years thats tainted the aquifer on the lower Cape, thats another story…