show off their piloting skills. The pilot dropped the chopper down to about a hundred feet off the deck.
He told the crew, “We’re now crossing the Fort Chafe Army Base, federal land. No need to worry about scaring the cows and chickens here. We’re going to do some low level VFR work here.” In other words, they were going to fly around using visual flight rules to check out the float streams.
They followed a stream and Dave overheard the pilot tell his copilot, “That’s where I’m putting my float boat in this weekend to catch beaucoup mega bass.” The chopper continued to follow the stream and then climbed sharply and turned back to the north.
The pilot said, “Enough fun and games, don’t know if we’re going to be able to get you guys in out there. The fog is still fairly thick at 4-7. We might have to shoot some instrument approaches to hone our skills. I’m going over the lake to do some instrument work.”
They spent the next half hour practicing instrument turns. You couldn’t tell up from down. They were flying in and out of a fog bank over the lake. Every time they’d turn into the fog bank it was like flying through a milk bottle. Dave was experiencing vertigo, but he held his own. He kept his stomach contents down.
“Okay, we’re going to continue out bound to 4-7. The sun is starting to thin this stuff out,” the pilot said. The chopper turned to the north, flew along a highway for several minutes and then started to circle the site. The fog had burned off enough for them to look down and see a gaping hole in the ground about 150 feet wide. Chunks of concrete and debris were scattered everywhere. The pilot lined the chopper up for the helipad and made a slow approach.
He said, “Okay, Mike, this one is all yours. You have the aircraft.”
The young copilot replied, “Roger, sir, I have the aircraft. Pre-landing checklist is complete.”
The crew chief spoke up, “Tail clear left and right.”
The chopper hovered ten feet off the pad. The power and pitch were adjusted and the Huey made a nice bounce on the pad. The pilot chided the young lieutenant. “You rushed that one a little bit. We’ll have to work on that.” After the chopper shut down, Bill and Dave climbed out and they walked up to the entry control point a hundred yards up the road.
It didn’t take long for things to make an impression on his first visit at the destroyed missile complex. After passing through the entry control point and walking up the site access road, they noticed a half dozen vehicles strewn about. These were remnants of the maintenance crew vehicles after the explosion. Most had their windows blown out. One pickup had both doors blown off. There were twenty to thirty people on the complex that day. Anything below ground was still strictly off limits. There was no radiation hazard. However, the hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide fuels were highly toxic and corrosive. There was concern that there might be residual fumes that migrated to the launch control center.
“Unbelievable.” Dave said. “It is hard to believe everyone within a half mile of the complex was not killed.”
Another thing he noticed was that the security fencing surrounding the complex was bent, twisted, and full of holes in several locations.
“What’s that over there?” he asked.
“It’s one of the flame deflectors.” Bill replied. “Those massive steel structures divert the launch exhaust outward away from the missile as it rises out of the silo. They are made of two inch thick high carbon steel.”
The mangled pile of plate steel was about 20 x 40 feet and 10 feet high. It was torn to pieces like a cardboard box, lying in the middle of a bean field several hundred yards away.
Basically the entire silo headworks above level three were peeled back and blasted out of the ground. It reminded him of a shotgun barrel that got plugged and then shredded after pulling the trigger. There were massive pieces of equipment, chunks of concrete, rebar, wiring, and steel everywhere. Part of the headworks included several ten foot thick I-beams that crisscrossed much like a tic-tac-toe pattern. These structural members were lying in a pile of concrete several hundred yards to the other side of the complex. They couldn’t even see the massive silo closure door. It was blasted over a sixty foot tall pine tree at the back of the complex and landed in a field.
One of Lieutenant Sheridan’s assigned tasks was to calculate the explosive force in kilotonage that resulted in blowing a 740 ton door nearly 750 feet. That was nearly a ton per foot. He got the calculator out and crunched the following numbers:
The energy in one pound of TNT is about 2,300 BTUs.
The Titan burns hydrazine as a fuel and has 12,178 BTUs per pound which is nearly six times as energetic as TNT.
The Titan II carried 104,000 pounds of hydrazine.
Thus the explosive power in kilotonage of TNT:
104,000 lb x 12,178 BTU/lb
= 1,266,512,000 BTU ÷ 2,300 BTU/lb
= 550,675 lb of TNT.
He thought out loud, “Holy shit! That’s one hell of a big bang! This was equivalent to a small tactical nuke going off.” It came out to over a quarter of a kiloton in explosive force and this didn’t even include the energy in the oxidizer. The Hiroshima atomic bomb was only fifteen kilotons. This was put in the accident investigation report. He was on the job less than two weeks and he was already published.
The young lieutenant walked up to a slab of concrete hanging over the edge of the silo crater. He peered over the edge.
Just then someone yelled, “Get off that, you dumb shit!” A big burley Master Sergeant rushed over yelling more obscenities as he ran. Dave was taken back a little. They didn’t teach you at OTS what to do when a 240 pound, 6 foot NCO calls you a dumb shit and starts running at you.
Just then, Bill raised his hand and yelled back, “Calm down, Mitch. He’s with me.”
Mitch stopped dead in his tracks. He immediately apologized, “Sorry, sir. I didn’t recognize you. However, I must respectfully ask you to step back from the edge. This whole area is in danger of falling into the hole. We’ve got enough problems out here without fishing out a butter bar. No one is allowed near the crater without being tethered off.”
Lieutenant Sheridan gave a professional response, “Thanks for the warning. By the way, I am not a butter bar. I worked hard for these gold bars.”
Mitch responded, “You’re right, Lieutenant, my mistake.”
He reached out his hand and said, “Look, I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot here, especially since it would’ve resulted in a 150 foot drop.” Mitch grabbed it, shook it firmly and smiled.
Bill spoke up, “I hear you’re having some problems with the pumping out here. What’s going on?”
The silo bottom had been filling up with groundwater and rain water the last couple of weeks. There was about thirty feet of water in the hole. They were dumping five gallon buckets of HTC, a pool treating chemical, to neutralize the fuel in the silo. They had lowered a pump down the hole and were attempting to pump it into tanker trucks topside.
Mitch responded to
