How long does it take to cart off 350 tons of explosives?

[Inland]

I mean, I assume that this stuff didn't get carted off in eighteen wheelers. SO HOW MANY months did this stuff have to escape even the slightest attention for this heist to be completed? I mean, I think of Iraqi residents in the area just looking at pickups going back and forth on the road to the depot and thinking, "there goes more explosives!" and our incompetent leadership being the last people in Iraq to know.

[Warpy]

1. It could easily have been carted off in 18 wheelers

The Bush gang made sure the oil fields were secured, and left everything else in that country open to looting, including all of Hussein's ammunition dumps. It was obscene, and this is the stuff that will be paying us back for Bush's illegal war for decades.

Nobody needed to be the least bit subtle in looting. Everything was wide open except the OIL.

[BOSSHOG]

3. And observed from Satellites

Gosh, must have been heavy cloud cover that day.

[TahitiNut]

37. Not 18-wheelers. Here's what a 10-ton truck looks like.

It'd take, at a minimum, 40 loads in one of these (or one load in 40 of these) to cart off 380 tons (350 metric tonnes) of explosives in containers.

[autorank]

2. This is the most intelligent question raised on this issue. Brilliant!

[Hello_Kitty]

24. Good God John and John look good in that pic......

[elehhhhna]

28. Ask Carlyle./ They're probably auctoning them off right now.

[salinen]

4. Securing the oil fields

and not the munitions dumps. Later the oil fields are bombed. Sheer genius!

[catmandu57]

5. 350 tons = 700,000 lbs

They sure as hell didn't cart it out in wheel barrows.

[oscar111]

7. # of 18 wheeler loads? how many tons per truck?

any bigger trucks exist, as in iron ore mines?

[ArkDem]

18. Standard size load in US is 40 tons but they can be loaded

heavier if they don't have to worry about federal regulations. So it would be less than 10 truckloads.

[mrbill]

23. 40 tons in one truck, don't think so.......

Those big rock-hauler highway trucks only hold 8-12 square yards, a yard of crushed rock weights right at a ton.

380 tons would be 380 one ton pickups or 760 Ford Rangers.

[lectrobyte]

29. I think the useful load of a typical 18 wheeler is like 20 ~ 25 tons,

and in the U.S., gross weight used to be limited to 80,000 lbs. It may be higher now for those tandem trucks etc. Anyway, 20 truckloads tops to move it out, probably less without those D.O.T. restrictions.

[PBX9501]

40. they may be thinking 40000lbs, which is accurate(nt)

[TahitiNut]

41. A suitably-designed 18-wheeler can carry 80,000 pounds (40 tons).

That's a realtively common load weight maximum for an 18-wheeler. I don't believe that's what one would assume was used, however. Clearly, to carry away 380 tons of material, packaged in some way, some hauling equipment would be necessary. Ten-ton trucks are relatively common ... and are what I'd assume.

[gpandas]

6. majic-allah stepped in confronted god. n/t

[NeoGreen]

8. Think of it this way...

It would have taken a flight of three USAF C5 Galaxy aircraft to lift the material out of Iraq and secure it at a US friendly Military installation. Say, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

Failure do have done so shows the level of incompetence exhibited by the leadership of this war.

[diamond14]

14. welcome to DU, DemoGreen....thanks for joining us !!!

:bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce:


:hi: :hi: :hi: :hi: :hi: :hi: :hi: :hi: :hi: :hi: :hi:


:toast: :toast: :toast: :toast: :toast: :toast: :toast: :toast: :toast:


and thank you for your military service.....I still miss my cousin, Charlie (HM3 Medic, KILLED in Vietnam, 19 years old, Silver Star, Purple Heart DEAD).....my nephew is serving in Iraq today...my DAD served in WWII and four of my uncles, one uncle served in Korea....

[rocktivity]

15. SIR! Welcome to DU, DemoGreen SIR!

I hope we can count on providing us with your expertise!

:headbang:
rocknation

[leftchick]

16. Thank you DemoGreen!

Great post! Although this does far beyond incompetence. I think since a war was going on at the time of the looting the US is guilty of yet more war crimes. How many people in Iraq have been killed with this stuff? Were the explosives used in the bombing at the UN building in Baghdad last year from this stockpile? This is such a grievous error it defies logic.

Welcome to DU!

:toast:

[Inland]

21. Apparently, you have given the matter more thought than the US ever did

But then again, so did the people who stole the stuff out from under the US nose, too.

[leftofthedial]

9. How many people doing the carting?

I'd guess it took a while. The proto-insurgents probably used the facility as their own private ammo dump for a while. The bushgang was interested only in oil for months.

[jpak]

10. A magic lamp, one large jin and a few flying carpets is all it would take

Shazaaam!!

[gatlingforme]

11. I think Cheney should answer that question he has been warning

that if we elect John Kerry our cities will be exposed to threat.! Maybe he knows something we don't.

[catmandu57]

12. Makes that little gun buyback

look sick doesn't it.

[Blue_Tires]

13. and where do you hide it afterwards??

[Jacobin]

19. all over the place

[Inland]

20. Well, unfortunately, you can break it up into small bombs.

[Jacobin]

17. Well that translates to 700,000 pounds of stuff

It would probably take 1,400 half ton pick up truck loads to get it all out.

Apparently, its been open for months and months so I guess it was pretty easy, since we were only watching the pipelines.

There's going to be lots of 'booms' in Iraq (and elsewhere) for a very very very long time. They literally do have 'tons' of the stuff.

[TahitiNut]

42. Don't forget the packaging ... containers.

I'd assume the characterization of 380 tons is the net weight of the explosives ... not including the containers. Thus, it'd be reasonable to assume about 400 tons of load weight (or more).

[Inland]

45. Interesting point. NET packaging weight 380 tons, Gross much more.

[DeepModem Mom]

22. kick

[MadHound]

25. Well, let us assume they didn't use vehicles,

Since they wouldn't want to be noticed by satellites. Let us say they have one hundred people who could do the hauling. Each person is stout, so, say they could carry one hundred pounds per trip. Thus, the whole shift of people could carry out five tons per trip. Seventy trips later, and it's all gone. Say you make three trips a day, and poof, nothing to see in a couple of weeks. And it would all be spread out all over the country.

[Inland]

27. Remember they are carrying EXPLOSIVES

and probably carry only what can be carried with certainty that nothing will be dropped. So a hundred pounds a trip---I don't know about that.

[MadHound]

31. Well, assuming it is dynamite, C4, something like that,

It wouldn't be a problem. Explosives like that, unless they are quite old and sweating nitro(and then only a fool would carry any amount) require a blasting cap, electric spark, something along those lines in order to explode. Dropping them won't do a thing. And honestly, a hundred pounds of C4 isn't that much, a large packpack full.

[lectrobyte]

32. well yeah, but probably somebody knows someone who has a

friend with a big truck. Especially in a country with a lot of unemployment. So, your entrepreneurial black marketeer would figure that packing it out 50 or 100 lbs at a time would be, uh, hard work. And if it's crated up or something, you can camouflage the load with other cargo, and take it away in a few fell swoops etc. etc. Assuming 25 tons at a whack, that's on 14 or so truck loads.

[Inland]

43. If I were carrying explosives, I wouldn't make many assumptions

driving a truck down a potholed Iraqi road, daring gunshots, trying to escape detection. That's why a hugely efficient operation is unlikely.

[slor]

26. Maybe, in a shining example...

of democracy and cooperation, the kind that our great leader has inspired in the Iraqis, the people of Iraq formed a line, and moved the explosives via buckets, not unlike how the people used to put out fires.

[HEIL PRESIDENT GOD]

47. LOL

That's the funniest thing I've read all week.

[Q]

30. Absent from this debate...

...is the fact that the US has had Iraq under satellite surveillance for a very long time. NOTHING moves in that country without the US knowing about it.

[Julian English]

33. would you really load a truck to maximum capacity with explosives?

Would the material require special packing? I think so.

This might double or treble the gross weight. And gross incompetence.

[lectrobyte]

35. If it's plastic explosive, then, why not? Like one of the other posters

mentioned, this stuff is pretty user-friendly, not like that bottle of liquid nitro in the old movies...

[Maestro]

34. This has me completely flabbergasted

How in the hell could so much weaponry be taken? Demogreen's assessment is staggering. The C5 is an enormous plane for it to take 3 of them is astronomically huge. The poor planning and levels of incompentency are so apparent here that it is mind-numbing. How could they not secure this place? They knew about it. The arms were already tagged. Yet another gaffe in a long line of gaffes for this pathetic administration.

[Q]

36. No matter how the Bushies spin it...

...nothing but the oil fields and ministry was 'secured' after the invasion.

[wishlist]

38. Takes a large dump truck to carry even 10 tons of gravel

I had 10 tons of gravel delivered, it took a large dump truck that appeared loaded to the gills.

Since these explosives were presumably contained in vials, barrels or boxes, even more cargo room would have been required to haul it off since the containers would add a lot of extra weight and bulk beyond the 377 tons of explosives contained.

[JHB]

39. Talking points memo on this...

...and the implausibility of the current spinning that the explosives were missing when US troops first reached the site:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_10_24.php#003800

Certainly there would have been time enough to move the stuff. That's almost a month. But this would be a massive and quite visible undertaking. As the Times noted yesterday, moving this material would have taken a fleet of about forty big trucks each moving about ten tons of explosives. And this was at a time -- the week before and then during the war -- when Iraq's skies were positively crawling with American aerial and satellite reconnaissance.

Considering that al Qaqaa was a major munitions installation where the US also suspected there might be WMD, it's difficult to believe that we wouldn't have noticed a convoy of forty huge trucks carting stuff away.

As the LA Times notes in Tuesday's paper, it's just not particularly credible ...

Given the size of the missing cache, it would have been difficult to relocate undetected before the invasion, when U.S. spy satellites were monitoring activity at sites suspected of concealing nuclear and biological weapons.
"You don't just move this stuff in the middle of the night," said a former U.S. intelligence official who worked in Baghdad.



If we had seen something like that happening, it's hard to figure we wouldn't have bombed the convoy, since the US had complete air superiority through the entire campaign. And if the thought that WMD might be on those trucks had prevented such an attack, certainly there would have been running surveillance of where the stuff was going and where it ended up.

[Inland]

44. IOW, hard to miss if you were looking for it, easy if not.

[Hutzpa]

46. Folks you're missing the point, this is the Ammo for Oil program

we take their oil, we allow them to steal the ammo.