Quote Originally Posted by hemmjo View Post
I have a friend who was clearing come land on an old farm. It had a large barn, all of the timbers were rotten, not worth salvaging. Long story shorted they burned that barn. At the end of the day, they had a large pile of hot ashes, galvanized roofing etc. They used a bulldozer to push the hot ashes into a large hole they had prepared ahead of time. Each day for a while they would turn the ashes with a large track-hoe.

After a month or so, they pulled all of the metal roofing out to take to recycling. The recycle center would not accept the metal. Turned out while in the ground with the hot ashes, it had become radioactive enough to trigger their Geiger counter. They told him to bring it back in a year as it would probably be safe enough for them to accept.

They told him that is happens a lot with metal they get that has been under ground for a length of time.

I had never heard of such a thing.
You got to be careful of them Geiger's they can be nasty little varmints
I knew a guy who had a whole load of used oilfield pipe rejected at a salvage center because of the stray radiation. Only it wasn't the pipe it was his trailer that was hot. the large tub demolition trailer had been used to haul demolished buildings before he bought it there was no telling what where or when it had been filled with materials active enough to be absorbed by the steel of the trailer.