A blast occurred on Monday at a storage depot for unexploded ordnance at a U.S. base on the island of Okinawa, Japan, that left four Japanese soldiers wounded, officials said. Fortunately, none of the wounds are life-threatening.
The explosion took place as the troops were conducting work in a prefecture-operated facility intended for the temporary storage of unexploded ordnance, the majority of it from World War II and frequently found throughout the island. Okinawa was the location of one of the bloodiest fights during the war.
Prefectural authorities acknowledged that the injuries included injury to the soldiers’ fingers but would not say more.
In a statement issued by the U.S. Air Force, the accident occurred inside Kadena Air Base’s munitions storage facility, on a site being operated by the Okinawa prefectural government. The Air Force made it clear that ‘no U.S. servicemembers were involved in the incident’.
Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF) said the explosion occurred when the troops were examining one of the devices at the storage facility. NHK television further reported that the explosion occurred while the team was trying to scrape rust from the ordnance. The SDF is probing the reasons for the explosion. This is the first such accident since the Japanese army started its unexploded ordnance disposal unit in 1974.
Even decades after the war, huge amounts of unexploded bombs, predominantly from U.S. forces are continually unearthed in Japan, especially in Okinawa. The island is thought to have as much as 1,856 tons of the ordnance.
In an earlier similar incident last October, a war-era bomb exploded at a commercial airport in southern Japan, creating a big crater and causing many flights to be disrupted.
