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Author
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Topic: Grenades found in Delaware Driveways
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John Lasher
Master Film Handler
Posts: 493
From: Newark, DE
Registered: Aug 2001
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posted 05-06-2004 11:36 PM
Source: The News Journal
A CASE OF SHELL SHOCK
Since Feb., almost 100 war relics have been found among clamshells
By TERRI SANGINITI AND CHIP GUY
Staff reporters
05/04/2004
Laurel poultry grower Bill Layton said he didn't count on finding explosives in his driveway when he spent $600 in November to cover it with clam-shells.
Last month, while poking around in the driveway about 40 feet from his rear door, Layton spotted a grayish object in the crushed shells. It was a World War I French rifle grenade. Thirteen more grenades were found later by a state police bomb team.
"That's what scares the hell out of me," Layton said. "We've been riding over them all winter."
For the past three months, surplus munitions dumped at sea decades ago have been turning up in some shell-covered driveways in Sussex County. Authorities believe the rusted explosives are being dredged up by clam harvesters from the Atlantic Ocean in spots where the Army dumped surplus ordnance after World War I and World War II.
Since early February, bomb disposal teams from the state police and Dover Air Force Base have responded to nine complaints, removing nearly 100 of the potentially dangerous war relics from yards and driveways near Bridgeville, Delmar, Laurel, Gumboro and Rehoboth Beach.
State police Cpl. Jeff Oldham said anyone who purchases clamshells for driveways should contact police if they see anything out of the ordinary in the shell piles.
"I would use extreme caution and be very observant when spreading them," Oldham said. "If you come across anything that looks like ordnance, stop, get away from it and call police."
Many rural residents in Delaware and southern New Jersey, especially on farms and in beach towns, use crushed clamshells as an economical way to create a driveway. Layton's $600 bought about 50 tons of clamshells. Stone, asphalt and concrete could have cost anywhere from three to 10 times as much to cover the same area.
But the cluster of recent ordnance findings are giving some folks second thoughts about their safety.
Assistant Delmar Fire Company Chief Joe Morris, the first downstate resident this year to report finding ordnance in his driveway, said state police bomb technicians retrieved three WWII pineapple grenades from his Waller Road property.
"They looked like clumps of rusted metal," he said. "I'm surprised they hadn't blown apart."
Morris said he had driven over his driveway for three months before a friend helping him move railroad ties discovered a grenade.
"He told me, 'You've got a grenade in your driveway,' " Morris said. "I reached down and picked it up and said, 'Yes, that's a grenade all right.' "
Three days before the find, Morris said, a huge propane truck backed up over the clamshell driveway to fill his propane tank.
"After I found these things I said, 'God Almighty!' " he said.
Even people who don't have clamshell driveways are on edge.
Phyllis Kane, 66, of the Woods on Herring Creek near Lewes, found a 4-inch round green orb about a year ago while planting flowers in her yard. She tucked it away in the garage, not thinking much of it, but pulled it out recently and wondered if it might be a grenade. On Thursday, she asked state police to look at the object.
It turned out to be an old lawn ornament.
A munitions mystery
Military historians, police, fishery and federal officials are trying to figure out exactly how the grenades and artillery shells have become embedded in batches of locally processed clamshells.
Explosives found in the last two months include WWI French rifle and British Mills grenades, WWII-era Mark II grenades, mortar rounds and a 30 mm anti-aircraft projectile. Experts describe the ordnance as live and very unstable. It has been destroyed on a special range at Dover Air Force Base.
Seventy explosives were found in one 800-foot-long Bridgeville driveway. The most recent find, an encrusted missile-type projectile about 8 to 10 inches long with fins, was retrieved April 8 from the Cooper Road driveway of David Austin, who lives near Gumboro.
"It looked like a really small bomb," Austin said. "This thing was encased in deteriorating iron. Nobody would have known what it was."
Austin said trucks traveling over the driveway must have caused the ordnance to surface.
State police Detective Gerry Windish, who is heading an investigation into the munitions mystery, said all of the shells used to pave the driveways were hauled by Milford-area trucker Perry Butler from Sea Watch International's clam processing plant in Milford.
Company officials, who are based in Easton, Md., did not return repeated calls for comment.
Butler, the only supplier of clamshells in the state, said he has hauled countless tons of the crushed shells all over the area for more than two decades. He said he wasn't concerned.
Butler said he picks up the discarded shells daily from a holding tank at the Sea Watch plant. He said the clams are being harvested off the New Jersey coast.
"I've never had no problem and I don't think there could be," Butler said. "All these clams go through a big steam shucker, augers and conveyors at the plant and if something was going to happen, it would happen at Sea Watch."
The recent discoveries prompted the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration to conduct a safety inspection last month at the plant, Sea Watch's only clam-processing plant in Delaware. Agency officials said results are expected within six months.
Mike McGee of Reginald Stubbs Seafood Inc. in Chincoteague, Va., said in his 30 years in the seafood business he has never heard of any grenades turning up in a batch of clamshells.
"I don't understand it," he said.
Tom Hoff, a senior ecologist with the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, a member of the governing body that creates regulations for fisheries that are three to 200 miles out, said there are two large sites where surplus ordinance was dumped off the coast. One is about 70 miles east of Indian River Inlet and the other 50 miles southeast of Atlantic City. Hoff said no law prohibits fishermen from dredging in the marked disposal sites.
The fishermen harvesting the clams might operate a dredge for 15 minutes and bring up a ton or two of clams in cages, which are then placed on a truck and shipped on the Cape May-Lewes Ferry to the Milford processing plant, he said.
Caution needed
State police Cpl. Rusty Parker of the Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit said he has seen random munitions recovered over the years, but not to the degree of the past few months.
"You have to treat every one of them, giving them the most respect as possible because you don't know what potential harm they could do," Parker said. "Every one is different and they could go off under the right circumstances."
Robert Williams Jr., of the Army Corps of Engineers Baltimore District, which oversees ordnance issues at former defense sites, said plant workers may have been "just lucky" that none of the ordnance has exploded.
Layton, the Laurel poultry grower who discovered ordnance in his driveway, said the find made him uneasy. He has learned a valuable lesson, he said with a laugh: "Walk gently, that's all I can say."
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