1/ There's a video tonight (very graphic; I won't link it) of a man in Jericho being killed by a falling Iranian missile fragment. It highlights how dangerous air defence debris is - it killed thousands of British civilians in WW2. 
2/ The photo above shows dense German anti-aircraft fire in Brest, France in 1941. Anything hit by ground fire does, of course, have a good chance of being brought down, endangering anything below. But what of the stuff that's being fired?
3/ Simon Webb, in his book "Secret Casualties of World War Two", gives some hair-raising statistics about the amount of air defence debris that landed on Britain's towns and cities in WW2.
4/ "In London, anti-aircraft guns were firing perhaps 10,000 shells in a night. Taking as an average a weight of 30lbs and assuming that about a quarter of that weight would be taken up by the explosive charge within the shell, means that each shell would deposit...
5/ ... somewhere in the region of 22.5lbs of steel fragments on the ground below. If, as we did before, we guess that 10 per cent of the shells did not explode in mid-air, then that would give us something over 9,000 which did.
6/ "If we multiply 22.5 by 9,000, we find that 202,500lbs of metal would fall onto the streets of London in one night. This equates in metric terms to 91,852kg or over 90 metric tonnes of pieces of metal, every single night for months on end."
7/ Not surprisingly, this killed a lot of people. Unexploded shells fell out of the sky and killed them in their beds. Large pieces of shrapnel could penetrate a steel helmet. In the morning, they would find the roads littered with still-hot debris.
8/ The only way to be safe was to be in an air raid shelter - and this is why, if the sirens go off, you really don't want to ignore them. /end
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