Hawthorne Army Depot (HWAD) is a U.S. Army Joint Munitions Command ammunition storage depot located near the town of Hawthorne in western Nevada in the United States. It is directly south of Walker Lake. The depot covers 147,000 acres (59,000 ha) or 226 sq. mi. and has 600,000 square feet (56,000 m2) storage space in 2,427 bunkers. HWAD is the "World's Largest Depot". It is divided into three ammunition storage and production areas, plus an industrial area housing command headquarters, facilities, engineering shops, etc.
An ammunition dump, ammunition supply point (ASP), ammunition handling area (AHA) or ammunition depot is a military storage facility for live ammunition and explosives.
The Picatinny Arsenal is an American military research and manufacturing facility located on 6,400 acres (26 km2) of land in Jefferson and Rockaway Township in Morris County, New Jersey, United States, encompassing Picatinny Lake and Lake Denmark. The Arsenal is the headquarters of the US Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Armaments Center. It is known for developing the ubiquitous Picatinny rail, as well as being the Army's center of expertise for small arms cartridge ammunition.
There have been many extremely large explosions, accidental and intentional, caused by modern high explosives, boiling liquid expanding vapour explosions (BLEVEs), older explosives such as gunpowder, volatile petroleum-based fuels such as gasoline, and other chemical reactions. This list contains the largest known examples, sorted by date. An unambiguous ranking in order of severity is not possible; a 1994 study by historian Jay White of 130 large explosions suggested that they need to be ranked by an overall effect of power, quantity, radius, loss of life and property destruction, but concluded that such rankings are difficult to assess.
The RAF Fauld explosion was a military accident which occurred at 11:11 am on Monday, 27 November 1944 at the RAF Fauld underground munitions storage depot in Staffordshire, England. It was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history and the largest on UK soil.
Şemdinli is a town located in the Şemdinli District of Hakkari Province in Turkey and had a population of 42,626 in 2021.
The Lagos armoury explosion was the accidental detonation of a large stock of high explosives at a military storage facility in the city of Lagos, Nigeria, on 27 January 2002. The fires created by the debris from this explosion burnt down a large section of Northern Lagos, and created a panic that spread to other areas. As people fled the flames, many stumbled into a concealed canal and drowned. The explosion and its aftermath are believed to have killed at least 1,100 people and displaced over 20,000, with many thousands injured or homeless. The government of Nigeria launched an enquiry, which blamed the Nigerian Army for failing to properly maintain the base, or to decommission it when instructed to do so in 2001.
At approximately 12 p.m. local time on Saturday, March 15th, 2008, an ex-military ammunition depot in the village of Gërdec in the Vorë Municipality of Albania, U.S and Albanian munitions experts were preparing to destroy stockpiles of obsolete ammunition. The methodical destruction of the old ammunition was supposed to occur with a series of small, controlled explosions. However, a chain of events led to the entire stockpile detonating simultaneously. Hundreds of houses were demolished within a few kilometres of the depot, while car windows on the Tirana-Durres highway were shattered by the main explosion, which involved more than 400 tonnes of propellant in containers. A large fire caused a series of smaller but powerful explosions that continued until 2 a.m. on Sunday. The explosions could be heard as far away as the Macedonian capital of Skopje, 170 km (110 mi) away.
The 2008 Chelopechene explosions were a series of explosions that began early on Thursday morning 3 July 2008 at around 6:30 am local time at a munitions depot in the suburb of Chelopechene, 10 kilometres east of the centre of the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. The initial explosions were powerful enough to be heard in the entire capital and surrounding villages. The depot was part of a military facility that specialised in dismantling obsolete ammunition.
The July 2007 Syrian arms depot explosion was a blast in July 2007 at a highly secretive Syrian missile base. The Syrian government said the explosion was the result of an accidental detonation of an ammunition dump, but later reports suggested it was the result of a Syrian chemical weapons experiment.
This is the timeline of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. The Kurdish insurgency is an armed conflict between the Republic of Turkey and various Kurdish insurgent groups, which have demanded separation from Turkey to create an independent Kurdistan, or to have autonomy and greater political and cultural rights for Kurds in Turkey. The main rebel group is the Kurdistan Workers' Party or PKK, which was founded on November 27, 1978, and started a full-scale insurgency on August 15, 1984, when it declared a Kurdish uprising. Apart from some extended ceasefires, the conflict has continued to the present day.
On 4 March 2012, a series of blasts occurred at an army arms dump in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo. At least 300 people were killed by the explosions. Additional bodies were said to be "unfindable." Among the dead were six Chinese workers from a Beijing Construction Engineering Group work site close to the armoury. Interior Minister Raymond Mboulou said that nearby hospitals were overflowing with injuries, with many wounded lying in hallways due to lack of space. Total injuries exceeded 2,500. More than 121,000 people were left homeless and 672 million dollars in damages were done. One survivor described the event as feeling like "the apocalypse;" others described it as "like a tsunami" or "earthquake".
Mitholz or Blausee-Mitholz is a village in Kandergrund municipality in the canton of Bern in Switzerland. It has 170 inhabitants and Blausee-Mitholz is a station on the Lötschberg railway line. A munitions storage explosion in 1947 destroyed the village and killed 9 people; a safety study commissioned in 2018 found that the site still contained munitions and was unsafe, and in 2020 the government announced that the village must be temporarily abandoned in 2030 for a clean-up that is projected to last 10 years.
This article lists a chronology of events in the South Thailand insurgency from the 1960s. Most take place in the Muslim-majority, contested provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani, and Yala in the far south of Thailand bordering Muslim Malaysia.
The ammunition depot at Kalynivka, near Vinnytsia, Ukraine, underwent a series of multi-kiloton explosions that started on the evening of September 26, 2017 and continued burning until September 30. In 2021 the Prosecutor General announced that evidence confirmed sabotage.
In 2014, two explosions of ammunition depots occurred in Vrbětice of Vlachovice) in the Zlín District of the Czech Republic. The first explosion occurred on 16 October, and the second on 3 December. Two people were killed in the first explosion. The cleaning of unexploded ammunition left by the blasts ended on 13 October 2020. According to the Security Information Service and the Police of the Czech Republic, two agents from GRU Unit 29155 were involved in the explosions, with the motivation of disrupting weapons supplies to Ukraine.
The 2022 Chornobaivka attacks were a series of Ukrainian attacks against the Russian-held Kherson International Airport at Chornobaivka, which began on 27 February 2022 during the southern Ukraine campaign of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Chornobaivka, located in Ukraine's Kherson Oblast, saw dozens of attacks on Russian positions by the Ukrainian Armed Forces following a bombing and takeover by the Russian Armed Forces of the town's airport.
