Man Finds WWII Grenade - Hilarity Ensues

[Longhorn789]

Real man of genius....

Sort of sounds like it may have been a dummy since it was "secured" rather than detonated by bomb squad. However, the fellow that found it and thought enough of it to toss it into a car and drive with it to a police station sure didn't think it was a dummy...


Man turns in a grenadeBy Elizabeth Campbell
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
The thing had to be almost 70 years old, but no one was taking any chances when a man walked into the Burleson Police Department early Thursday and handed over a World War II pineapple-style grenade.

The man had been hired to clean out a shed behind a Burleson home, a spokeswoman said.

Very carefully, officers placed the grenade in an armored truck and called Fort Worth's bomb squad. Investigator E.C. Rodriguez said the grenade was secured, not blown up. Fort Hood authorities have to decide what to do with it.

It's unusual but not unheard of for World War II ordnance to turn up, said Lt. Kent Worley, a Fire Department spokesman.

"People pass away, and family members sometimes find things in trunks," he said.

[SteelCore]

"People pass away, and family members sometimes find things in trunks"

LMAO!

[tanstaafl4y]

+1 on the fark-esque headline.

I'm glad I'll be dead when they clean out my house.

[okie shooter]

On stuff like that, guess the rules on counting the stuff when the troops came back from the field was far less. I am sure that you cant get away with a grenade these days in the army. Something that old, and you are not sure how it was stored, would make me worry some what about its stablity. Mercuric, and azide priming compounds are highly senstive, with copper some where in the train, you can get things that explode when you just lightly jostile them. We lost a building and seven people to some ammo in the seventies, that was less than thirty years old and was just stored, not even harshly.

I am not looking foward to takeing apart some rounds the army has poor information, they cannot even tell me what they are for sure, So I may have to go out and figgure out them before we can even devlop a method to demil the things, and they pack as much punch or more than a grenade, and we have a couple of million or so of them.

[LorDiego]

I've never seen a granede go off except from movies... so pardon my ignorance...

BUT did it really need an armoured truck, and probably a whole tactical team of bomb squad experts to get it secured?

[drine]

I've heard of some folks to be really close and suffer minor concusion injuries and others to be fairly far away and catch shrapnel in the vitals and die. We got to toss some in basic and the concusion is severe. So basically it's a crap shoot outside 30 m. Inside 20 feet and you'll know it one way or another. Don't remember the specs on the zones though.

[kevin]

if stuff is potentially unstable why dont they just blow it up in a bunker? Ive been hunting out by the ammo plant when they have set multiple bunkers of handgrenades off at the same time, My aunt worked there and told me they removed the explosive and set them off in bunkers. I could feel the concusion about a mile away, not bad but you could see it coming in the trees, it was like an instant wind

[Seattlefungus]

The "Armored truck" used by most Police EOD has a blast chamber that is shaped like a vase, so if there is an explosion, the force is directed upward in a controlled fashion. Ours is on a tralier, the large van that pulls it has the robot, portable x-ray and bomb suits...

[Seattlefungus]

PS; When I was in the Corps in days of old.. We were using the M26 frag, the egg shaped one. That on had a kill radius of 3 meters and a Blast/Wound radius of 10 meters... That grenade was replace by the baseball type, I think it's the M67, sounds like the one found in the trunk was an old Mk 1 frag, the "Pineapple". In use from WWII until 1960's. and it had all kinds of fuse configurations, like 2 second fuse for Boobie traps up to 15 for special use. There was even a slightly larger one that was Wille Peter. (White Phosprous)... I got assigned to assist an EOD detail for 2 weeks. That was enough for me....

[okie shooter]

At the ammo plants, there are such things as grenade blast chambers, if you have a problem with a munition, you toss it into the chamber, and it directs the blast up out of the building thru a vent. The place of last resort if you have something go very wrong, and hopefully keeps the schrapal down, as with grenades, unless you are almost on top of it, the blast over pressure isnt what gets you, its the mameing caused by the fragments.

[Grasshopper]

Wow, at least this guy didn't give it to a couple of children to "Play with" like that dude last year in Kalifonia, killing around 3.

[SteelCore]

"pack as much punch or more than a grenade, and we have a couple of million or so of them."

-->Ooh, fun! THose are the days you could just freeze 'em air-drop them into a live volcano, I bet!