A B-52 Stratofortress collided with a tanker that was re-fueling it 31,000 feet above the Spanish coast on January 27, 1966. The tanker, which was full of fuel, exploded and its crew was instantly killed. The B-52 broke apart and four of the seven crew managed to parachute to safety. The B-52’s cargo fell onto the coast and into the Mediterranean Sea, however: four hydrogen bombs. Three crunched onto the beach and one splashed down and disappeared beneath the waves.

Fifty years ago today, the hydrogen bomb that landed in the Mediterranean, near Palomares, Spain, was finally retrieved. The three that had hit the ground had each partly detonated, but they did not set off the nuclear explosives inside. A four-mile area was contaminated by the plutonium. All that was known about the fourth bomb was that it too had not detonated, and that it was missing.

Twenty-nine ships, one aircraft carrier, and several submersibles were used over the subsequent six weeks in the search for the missing bomb. In March, it was located and an attempt was made to pull it to the surface, but it was dropped and lost again. Finally, on April 7, it was retrieved. The Spanish fisherman who saw it splash into the sea filed a claim for salvage rights, which the U.S. Air Force did not honor. At the top is a photo of the bomb after it was found.
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3:00 p.m. EST: Music legend Merle Haggard, whose 79th birthday is noted below, died today, his management company just announced. A song suggestion, “Mama Tried,” is below, and here is another suggestion: type his name in your iTunes and enjoy the stories.
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After exploring the area of the Pacific Northwest that we now know as British Colombia, George Vancouver wrote in the 1700s that the channel at Seymour Narrows was “one of the vilest stretches of water in the world.” On this date in 1958, it was cleared with 1,270 metric tons of Nitramex 2H explosive, which resulted in one of the biggest non-nuclear intentional explosions in history.

More than 250 feet deep, Seymour Channel held a mountain under its waves, dubbed Ripple Rock. The mountain’s twin peaks reached to within a few feet of the surface of the waters, which created a hazard that had claimed more than 100 boats and dozens of lives. Knowing that an invisible danger lay just below was a navigation nightmare. For decades, civil engineers studied the feasibility of destroying the mountain peaks with a controlled explosion.

The explosion launched 600,000 metric tons of rock 900 feet into the air. When the day came, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation used the event to broadcast Canada’s first-ever coast-to-coast live moment (below the fold):
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