If any reader is a nautical enthusiast and has a boat, they will know that there are some places where it is dangerous to navigate. One of them is in the estuary of the River Thames, at the height of the town of Sheerness. The Nore sandbank is located there, of very bad fame as we will see. But what is truly worrying is not so much the site as the fact that half outcropping on the surface are the remains of the SS Richard Montgomery , a ship full of explosives.
It is common for shipwrecks to keep in their holds the cargoes they were carrying at the time of the accident. Some are rescued, especially if it is something valuable, read coins and ingots, but most tend to remain at the bottom, along with their crew members, in those improvised underwater cemeteries. This can imply some danger because, sometimes, the nature of these goods is problematic, in the case of mercury or radioactive waste. Now, there is at least one case in which this risk is much more direct and the aforementioned ship is a good example.
The Nore Sandbank marks the point where the Thames meets the North Sea. As we said before, it is a place of bad omen due to its natural danger, which in 1732 forced the first known lighthouse ship to anchor permanently. However, the negative connotations of its name came a little later, in May 1797, when the crews of several Royal Navy ships - which used to concentrate at that point - mutinied due to the conditions of their life on board and the delay in the payments The ringleaders were executed but the Admiralty took note of their claims to try to solve them.
Over the following centuries it was obvious that the mouth of the river was a sensitive site that had to be protected, hence fortifications were built around it and, during World War II, coastal and anti-aircraft batteries were installed. In that last battle, the incident of the SS Richard Montgomery occurred. , while awaiting the arrival of a convoy that he was to join to cross the English Channel to the beaches of Normandy, where the famous D-Day had taken place the previous month.
The ship was the seventh in a series of 82 units of the same type built at the shipyards of the St. Johns River Shipbuilding Company, an American company specializing in Liberty class merchant ships. . They were artillery cargo ships that the US conceived to send to Great Britain under the Lend and Lease Act (food, oil and military material, first to the British and then to the other allies) to make up for the losses that the submarines Germans were causing the English fleet.
She was named after an Irish general who died in the assault on Quebec led by Benedict Arnold during the American Revolution and she was launched on June 15, 1943, being completed on July 29. She measured 128.88 meters long by 17.37 wide and 8.48 draft, having two propellers that allowed her to reach a speed of 11 knots and displacing a total of 14,474 tons. After several successful trips in the context of that war, in August 1944 she sailed from the port of Hog Island (at the mouth of the Delaware River, Philadelphia) bound for England, under the command of Captain Wilkie.
She was carrying 6,127 tons of explosives to be delivered to the artillery and engineering sections of the allied troops stationed on the continent, to supply them for their European campaign. Specifically, her final destination was the port of Cherbourg, where she should arrive after joining a convoy whose meeting point was the Thames estuary. When she arrived at the appointed place the harbourmaster (port authority officer) ordered him to anchor at a regular spot known as Great Nore Anchorage, in the northern part of Sheerness, Kent.
Then disaster struck. It was August 20 when she tried to anchor but the anchor did not catch on the sandy bottom and the SS Richard Montgomery she was getting dangerously close to the sandbank while the other ships that were also waiting for the convoy in the vicinity tried to warn her by sounding her sirens. However, no one on board knew how to interpret those signals and on top of that the captain was sleeping in his cabin; inexplicably, no one came to wake him up.
Shortly after, the ship ran aground 250 meters from the mouth of the Medway, a small river that also ends in the Thames Estuary, between the islands of Sheppey and Grain. The depth at that point was 7.3 meters, one meter below the draft of the SS Richard Montgomery , which also, by carrying the cellars full of it, had extended it another meter. The subsequent investigation cleared the captain of blame and placed it on the harbourmaster but in the meantime, the shipwreck left a real mega-bomb just 2.5 kilometers from Sheerness.
The risk for a stranded ship is that the waves that beat it can break its hull in a very short time, that's why a rescue group was hastily organized; not to take out the SS Richard Montgomery , which was considered lost, but to rescue the dangerous content of it. Stevedores from Rochester were in charge of doing the work and although they started just three days later, on the 24th what they feared happened:the hull broke and a leak flooded several bow holds.
The operation continued feverishly but on September 25 it became impossible to continue and all the personnel abandoned the ship, which later ended up breaking in half. A good part of the cargo had been removed, but not all of it; There were still 1,400 tons of explosives on board, including TNT, bombs of various types and weights, cluster and fragmentation bombs, phosphorous bombs, detonators, smoke bombs, signal pyrotechnics, etc.
That this took a back seat in a war context in which attention was focused on preventing the fall on London and other cities of the V-1 and V-2 self-propelled projectiles that Hitler began to launch desperately has its logic. What more than one will wonder is why no plan was undertaken in the following years, at the end of the war. The truth is that in 1967 there was a serious incident that led to the rejection of any possible idea that had been raised in this regard:the Kielce explosion. .
The Kielce it was a Polish cargo ship that had sunk in 1946 off the coast of Folkestone, a municipality also belonging to the county of Kent located not far from the previous one, a little further south, overlooking the English Channel instead of the North Sea . The ship, sunk 3 or 4 miles from land and therefore in deeper waters, carried an amount of explosives similar to that of the SS Richard Montgomery and when trying to remove them during the month of July of that same year, they exploded.
The explosion was so brutal that it opened a 6-meter crater on the seabed and experts compared the force of the incident to an earthquake measuring 4.5 degrees on the Richter scale. Despite the distance to Folkestone, panic broke out in the town. Miraculously, there were no injuries but the impression made was so great that extrapolating the situation to the SS Richard Montgomery it was calculated that it would produce a column of water 300 meters wide and that it could launch pieces of the ship up to 3,000 meters high, damaging the buildings of Sherness and also generating a giant wave of 5 meters.
These downward effects would later be recalculated but they would be just as destructive because although the wave would be much smaller, it would be enough to cause flooding in many municipalities on the Kent coast. Therefore, all the rescue plans for the merchandise were put on hold, opting to declare the wreck as dangerous on the nautical charts and mark the exact point, establishing an exclusion zone around it with both visual and radar surveillance.
Copper azide (a negative electrical charge resulting from the reaction between lead and copper in bomb components on contact with water) was thought to be very sensitive to causing an explosion, especially if there was a collision with debris. of the ship -which are at the surface of the water- or if the cargo moved violently due to the tide or a storm. Today it is believed that, after so many years, the corrosive effect of salt water will have acted decisively on the fuses of the pumps, making them no longer a danger and, therefore, removing the risk of explosion. This has been expressed by the MCA (Maritime and Coastguard Agency).
For greater safety, the two parts into which the hull was split are periodically inspected, evaluating their structural condition. It is deteriorating as slowly as progressively, although for now it does not seem to offer worrying signs of collapse. Consequently, it does not seem that in the short or medium term the wreck will be acted upon, but you never know because the situation is beginning to have other implications:the construction of the new London airport, whose location will be the Thames estuary (see the map above ), has opened political discrepancies on whether or not the SS Richard Montgomery should be left there .