“The really nasty stuff went into the dumps to the North of Donegal.”
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Another story for fishermen to beware of. And in recent years, a number of dangerous bombs and shells have been washed up on County Down beaches, a danger to beach users.
“Last week’s concern in North Wales that there were still stocks of nerve gas and other nasties disposed of there which should have disappeared with the deep sea dumping programme sixty years ago prompted me to do some research on the issue,” writes Bernard Moffat of the IOM Branch of the Celtic League.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-north-west-wales-36026703
“Most of our records now are in MNH (Mann) or the National Library of Wales so I turned to CARN in which some articles were published by me at the time.
“It turns out much of the really nasty stuff went into dumps to the North of Donegal.
“In CARN 88 (winter 1994) on page 22, we set out in detail the names of the obsolete liberty ship / freighters that were loaded with the material and then scuttles in the Atlantic:
“Nine of the 24 ships we list went to the area North of Donegal and also the Rockall deep. Another 12 ships went to the Biscay area of SW Ireland while we believe two were diverted to Beaufort Dyke because of bad weather in the Atlantic.
“Three ships, Empire Claire, Vogtland and Kotka carrying Tabun nerve gas bombs went into the dump off Donegal.
“Empire Claire was sunk with 3,500 tonnes of the material the exact quantities on the others are not known but were probably similar.”
Most of the ships (24 in total between 1945 – 1956) carried between 6,000 and 9,000 tonnes of ordnance.
The operation commenced with the scuttling of the Empire Peel in July 1945 described as carrying an ‘unknown tonnage’ of defective bombs.
Mr Moffat added: “The operation concluded with an ‘unidentified’ ship in September 1956 carrying 3,200 tonnes of mustard gas and phosgene bombs (this may have been one of the ships scuttled in Beaufort Dyke (the deep trench between Scotland and Northern Ireland) because the main munitions debris washed up in Mann, SW Scotland and the East coast of Ireland in recent years has been phosphorous based).
“As far as we are aware although there has been monitoring of some inshore dumps (particularly Beaufort Dyke) little has been done by the United Kingdom since in tipped these terrible cargoes into the Atlantic to check those locations.
“It’s a classic case of out of sight out of mind! Note, the source for this information was the MOD correspondence at the time!”
So the next time you trawl up a suspicious object in your net, or find one on the beach… beware!
