What sort of person wants to spend their days dealing with potentially lethal unexploded bombs?
Nick Morrison tries to get behind the cool exterior of the bomb disposal squad.
IN order to become a fully-trained member of the bomb disposal squad, you first have to undergo a demanding series of tests. Alongside an examination at the end of a five-week course, which comes on top of several years of training and experience, there is a psychometric assessment.
For, as well as having the necessary technical expertise to be able to deal with everything from a First World War grenade to a booby-trapped terrorist device, you need a particular kind of mental resilience; an ability to cope under pressure.
When everyone else is running around in a blind panic, you need to be the one keeping a cool head and taking decisions which could affect the safety of hundreds, if not thousands, of people.
The failure rate is high. Fewer than one in three who take the technical examination pass. More fall by the wayside at the psychometric barrier.
It's perhaps as a result of this, that those who spend their working lives dealing with the sorts of devices which would turn you or I into quivering wrecks, feel most comfortable playing down the risks they run.
"We're all fairly laid back - we don't get excited about trivial things," says Sergeant Sean Featherstone. "It must be the sort of people who get selected, they seem to be fairly mellow. Somebody who is looking to be a bit of a thrill-seeker would not get in.
"I see it as slightly dangerous, but I'm not attracted to the danger. I'm probably more attracted to the satisfaction of knowing that I can stop a device from working."
Sgt Featherstone is known as an operator. That is, when there is a bomb, grenade, mortar shell or other explosive - which all come under the heading of ordnance - to be disposed of, he is the one who decides what to do with it. Whether to blow it up where it is, take it away and store it, or remove it and blow it up, it's usually his call.
"You make an initial assessment of any situation, whether it is an unexploded bomb that has been dug up or a terrorist device, and then carry out the appropriate action.
"If it is a First World War shell you look to see if it has been fired or if it has been tampered with, or if the metal has started to degrade, which could affect the safety features. If it is a grenade, if it has got a pin in it is safe, or if you unscrew the base and there is no detonator it is safe to take it away. But if it has rusted you might need to blow it up straight away."
Sgt Featherstone, 32, is a member of Catterick-based 521 Squadron, in 11 Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Regiment, which covers the patch between the East Midlands and the Scottish border.
And he was the operator on duty when the call came in about the 1,000lb Second World War bomb unearthed by a digger in Sunderland earlier this month. As soon as he saw it, he knew it could spell trouble.
"All I could see was the back half sticking out of the mud at about 45 degrees," he says. "I knew it was a large aircraft bomb, and got the police to push the cordon out to 400 metres.
"They are very uncommon. That is the first time I have ever come across that type of bomb for real, although I have seen inert bombs like that, and seen them in books and manuals.
"Something like that should be quite safe, but it depends what has happened to it. If there was a battery inside the fuse it could have worn down by now, or the explosive could have become unstable. It would have taken a lot to set the explosive off, but the risk was still there."
In the end, the bomb, dropped from a Heinkel in a Luftwaffe raid over Sunderland in 1940, was dealt with by the Royal Engineers, who are responsible for enemy aircraft bombs, and detonated on Hendon beach, but only after more than 3,000 people had been evacuated from their homes.
A more regular side of 521 Squadron's bomb disposal work is dealing with grenades and ammunition which had been brought home by soldiers returning from the First and Second world wars, or ammunition used by the Home Guard which was buried in fields and back gardens. Urban spread means it is regularly being dug up or uncovered. Every year, around 3-4,000 people find explosives, either stumbling across them in fields and gardens or clearing out grandad's attic.
In one recent incident, Sgt Featherstone was called when a high explosive Second World War mortar shell was found by a young boy at Duncombe Park near Helmsley. The boy had kicked the shell around before showing it to his mother, who contacted the police. The shell still contained its fuse and the possibility it was unsafe meant it had to be blown up in situ.
For Sergeant Mark Dawson, 33, who spent five years as an assistant operator - whose duties include driving the remote-controlled wheelbarrow, used to tackle suspect terrorist devices - before retraining as an ammunition technician, variety is one of the chief attractions of life in the bomb disposal squad.
"It is a completely different job to anything else," he says. "It might sound corny, but it is not the same thing every day. The EOD side of it isn't our main job - we're responsible for supervising all the ammunition stored by the Army - but it is definitely the most dangerous.
"There is a lot of stuff still lying around that we have to go out and clear. Nine times out of ten you have got an idea of what you are going to do when you are still on the way out there."
But, he says, although it is one of the most dangerous jobs in the Army, job satisfaction comes more from the technical challenge of identifying and dealing with ordnance than from the thrill of danger. "As well as identifying what it is, we have to identify how it got there, whether it has been fired and whether it is in a dangerous state, and whether we can put it in the back of the van.
"You get a certain amount of satisfaction from every job you do, because you identify it and remove it and prevent an accident further down the line. In some respects it is dangerous, but we have been trained to approach every incident in the same sort of way, so we're always trying to minimise the danger, to ourselves and the public."
Sgt Featherstone is similarly self-deprecating over the risks they run, even though the excitement of blowing things up was one of the initial attractions.
"It sounded good when I joined the Army - it was a good promotion, good pay and blowing things up," he says. "But through training and experience we know what is safe, and we don't want to put ourselves in a dangerous situation.
"It would be wrong to say you didn't get an adrenaline rush, but it's really the challenge of using our own skills and knowledge to make a device safe."
What to do if you find a bomb
IF you see a device which you suspect might be dangerous:
Do NOT touch it and do NOT throw anything at it or hit it with anything.
Take as many details as you can, including approximate size, any markings, any writing, colour, what it is made out of and whether it is smoking.
Make a note of its exact location.
Inform the police immediately, and tell them what, if anything, you have done to it, ie dug it up in the garden.
Do NOT take it to the police station yourself - leave it where you found it.
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