There's some great stuff there mate..............
.....Now then..that explosive store reminds me of an incident in my demolition past..........
I once had a contract to demolish a small private coal mine that had gone bankrupt..............there was loads of tackle left lying around plus an elaborate screens system with stacks of light gauge rail and the tipplers and loads of tubs etc......... but..........also on the site a little way from the main buildings was an explosioves store exactly the same size and design as that one you saw......
.....The drill is that the actual explosives are kept in the bigger half of the safe and the detonators are in the smaller part.............The trouble was that the pit had gone bankrupt more or less overnight and the owners had upped sticks and fled in the night so to say.......so............
...........There was no-one to ask if the safe was empty and safe....
.....The former Under Manager still lived locally so I went and asked him and he said the safe was full of goodies the day before the pit shut and as far as he was aware and could find out for me...... he hadn't been told by anyone that it had been emptied.................so.......
..My contract with the liquidators stated the entire site was to be cleared of all salvageable and scrappable material before I could collect payment for the work.......... and.................
they were quite insistant on the safe also being cleared.......despite this insistence.........
they couldn't offer me any help on knowing whether the safe was still full of explosives or not and no-one had a clue as to the whereabouts of any keys either....
......so what do you do ?????????
It would be less than a minutes work to gas lamp yer way into the safe to check it was empty but ..
..........lets be honest .............
............even though the chances were pretty good that someone had removed the sugar.......would you honestly flame cut yer way into a safe that might contain enough explosives to blow you and the surrounding area to kingdom come?....
..............No......Of course you wouldn't ..........
........so we did the only thing we could in the circumstances and ended up sledge hammering and crow barring and cold chiselling the doors open to check........
....after a hell of a lot of sweating and grunting and about 4 hours of very hard graft I can now say from bitter expierience that those safes are damn hard to get open........
..........and yes the bloody thing was empty when we finally wrenched the doors open to see inside both compartments............
......Two minutes later the holding down bolts were lamped off from the inside and the whole thing was lifted onto one of my wagons for weighing in....................