Is SS Richard Montgomery safe or not ?

Is SS Richard Montgomery  safe or not  ?

The Richard Montgomery

Tucked away in the south east corner of England is the seaside town of Sheerness. On the surface you would think that Sheerness was just another pleasant holiday town, and you would be right, because you would have to go underneath the surface to a spot some three thousand yards off the seafront to find the dangerous secret that Sheer- ness has harboured for over forty years. A secret that although buried In sand and silt sixty feet down within the rusting hull of a World War 2 Liberty ship, Is so potentially hazardous that nothing is allowed nearer than five hundred feet.

When that Liberty ship , the Richard Montgomery, sank all those years ago it contained over seven thousand tons of explosives, enough to blow Sheerness and all its neighbours sky high, and In credibly its still all there like some giant time bomb ticking relentlessly away. The trouble is that nobody can seem to agree whether the clock has stopped, or is just about ready to strike. With today’s attitudes on all things ‘green’ it seems absurd that the Montgomery’s cargo was not made safe years ago, but absurdity and incompetence often go hand in hand, and incompetence certainly seems to have been the hallmark of this story right from the start.