Scrapyard in Fontana CA (Dicks Auto Works) bought 5000 tons of ordnance scrap from the government in 1996, came from clearance work at 29 Palms, Ft. Irwin and China Lake. It was delivered in a series of shipments, a few weeks later while breaking down mixed metals there was a detonation with one fatality. They had a large number of practice 105mm HEAT, aluminum and steel components. Their procedure was to throw it in the vise, heat it up with a torch and wrench it apart. Turns out that live rounds really don't like the heating part. I was the Quality Control officer for the UXO company that was called in to recertify all items on the site, over 100 significant live items were identified, including a 500lb bomb, 155mm, etc. The Quality Control officer for the company that had been doing the original work out of Ft. Irwin was subsequently arrested for some sort of negligent homicide charge, not sure how it ended up. Would have been tough to prove, but I suppose to a normal jury they might have bought it. From what we could see the charges had merit. We took over the Ft. Irwin clearance contract after that, they had another live 105 HEAT in their training aids.
The 500lb bomb was the real winner. Procedure by the scrapyard was to take the MK series practice bombs and torch cut them up one side and down the other, hit them a couple of times with a sledge hammer to pop it apart, then roll the concrete fill out for landfill material. The live bomb (MK82 500lb) was still marked, yellow on green. They had started cutting on one side and torched down to about 18-inches from the nose, right through the yellow nose band. You could see where the fill had started to burn, scorching the outside of the bomb, then snuffed itself out without enough oxygen when they stopped cutting. Somebody got very lucky.
I did a quick google search on the incident, came up with this article:
http://articles.latimes.com/1998/jul/06/news/mn-1222 There was no doubt in our minds at the time that he was guilty as hell of negligence and not doing his job, but it was also considered a slippery slope, in that by an outsider any accident could be considered much the same, possibly holding EOD and UXO personnel to impossible standards.