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Hong Kong’s ticking time bomb: unexploded wartime ordnance

Of the thousands of tonnes of bombs dropped over Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation, a significant proportion failed to detonate. Experts fear a catastrophe

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Bomb-disposal officer Adam Roberts inspects a 220kg bomb found in Pok Fu Lam on January 23. Picture: courtesy of the Police Public Relations Branch

Published: 7:47am, 1 Apr 2017Updated: 10:19am, 1 Apr 2017

Monday, January 23 was a particularly tough day for Adam Roberts. Crouching in a muddy pit on a Pok Fu Lam construction site, he came face to face with a 220kg bomb.

The call-out came shortly after 10am, after workers had unearthed the rusty bomb, one of thousands dropped by United States forces on occupied Hong Kong during the second world war. The AN-M64 contained 120kg of explosives and was designed to damage buildings and kill people within a 2km blast radius.

The workers who discovered it were probably unaware that when an AN-M64 detonates, it leaves a crater up to 11 metres in diameter and 3.7 metres deep. With the initial blast, capable of shattering windows and wrecking buildings, comes the fragmentation: thousands of tiny pieces of glass, rock, stone and wooden splinters travelling like missiles, capable of maiming or killing those in their path.

The Explosive Ordnance Disposal team builds a sandbag wall around the bomb at Pok Fu Lam. Picture: courtesy of PPRB

“That fragmentation could be moving at around 7,000 metres per second and, in a crowded city like Hong Kong, the consequences would be, to put it politely, messy,” says Roberts, a bomb-disposal officer with the Hong Kong Police Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Bureau.

The icy-calm Roberts betrays slight irritation when asked if it’s safe to assume that if a bomb hasn’t exploded for more than 70 years, it probably won’t.

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