Deadlier than the deadliest catch

(C&P)

Newport News Daily Press
June 7, 2007

AN EXPLOSIVE LEGACY: The series on unexploded ordnance

Deadliest Catch

Military bomb squads are called daily to deal with munitions - from grenades to rockets - found in civilian hands in the U.S.

By John M.R. Bull

Part five in a series

HAMPTON - The trawler Bald Eagle II pulled into port with a load of fresh fish and an old metal barrel tucked in a deck corner.

This quickly brought the police, the fire department and a bomb squad from nearby Langley Air Force Base. Sirens wailed.

The metal barrel was a World War II-era depth charge.

Packing 300 pounds of explosives, it was live and extremely dangerous.

Crew members admitted that they had been fiddling with the settings.

The depth charge had been pulled up off Atlantic City, N.J., and brought to Wanchese Fish Co. in Hampton, along with fluke destined for market. The bomb squad hauled the depth charge away and blew it up April 3, 2006.

"This was the first bomb I'd seen but probably not the last," said the Bald Eagle II's captain, Virgil Lockey.

"There's lots of strange stuff out there."

Military bomb squads across the country were summoned an average of three to four times a day last year to deal with unexploded munitions, according to a never-before-released Navy computer database and dozens of interviews with military explosives experts.

It wasn't an unusually busy year. Several squads, mostly stationed in California, do little else.

It's not new that civilians are sometimes found with military munitions. That's been happening for decades. But the extent of munitions discoveries - and the dangerousness of the items - hasn't been revealed before in this detail.

The Navy database documented 184 cases last year in which military bomb squads raced off base to retrieve or blow up munitions washed up on beaches or found in homes, housing developments, parks or boats.

And those 184 cases represent just 15 percent to 20 percent of all such responses, the Navy estimates.

If accurate, that would mean military bomb squads - known as explosive ordnance detachments, or EODs - reacted to between 900 and 1,200 reports of munitions found off military bases last year alone.

"Wow. It's surprising to me. It's higher than expected," said Lenny Siegel, who has tracked munitions issues for years for the advocacy group Center for Public Environmental Oversight. "No one should have to come in contact with munitions. The goal should be no encounters, not no fatalities."

The Navy says its militarywide database is incomplete because of a backlog inputting bomb squad reports as Navy teams deal with a higher priority: processing technical data on the roadside bombs in Iraq that have killed so many U.S. service members.

The Navy's estimate of total annual EOD off-base responses might be significantly underestimated.

Its database - which includes off-base responses from all the services - records only 29 Air Force bomb squad calls last year. But an Air Force database released to the Daily Press shows that the service went out on 558 such calls last year.

The databases reveal that last year, military bomb squads recovered at least 219 grenades, 49 white-phosphorous flares, 41 artillery shells, 23 mortar rounds, 14 bazooka rounds, 14 full-fledged rockets and a rocket warhead. All were live.

More than 20 live armor-piercing anti-tank rounds, four regular bombs and a cluster bomb were also found. Hundreds of fuses, not attached to an explosive, were recovered. If detonated, fuses could blow off fingers or hands.

Missile in Kansas

Four artillery shells filled with deadly mustard gas were picked up at a clam-processing plant in Delaware and destroyed last year. The shells were dredged up off New Jersey.

Other exotic munitions recoveries included the depth charge in Hampton, a claymore land mine in Louisiana and a torpedo in Mississippi.

They also included an Air Force SRAM air-to-ground ballistic missile found near Effingham, Kan., about 60 miles northwest of Kansas City, Mo. Those missiles were used in the 1960s and 1970s. An Army bomb squad blew up the missile and found that it had a hollow warhead - it didn't present the danger of a huge explosion. It isn't known how long the missile lay undetected in a civilian area.

Hearts raced throughout the Army's tight-knit munitions-response community last month, when word spread that a 115 mm M55 rocket had been found in a house being torn down in Brooklyn, N.Y. - an incident not included in the database.

Those rockets are deeply feared: They were made in the 1960s and contained the nerve agent VX, the most deadly chemical weapon ever created. A drop can kill a human within a minute.

The propellant used to fire the rockets was unstable. It had a tendency to ignite for no reason and with no warning. So the Army encased the entire stock of rockets in concrete and dumped them far off New Jersey in 1968.

A closer examination of the rocket found in Brooklyn revealed that it was a training round and didn't contain nerve gas. The military has no idea how it got there.

The military handles only a part - perhaps two-thirds - of munitions found off bases. State and local police bomb squads are called out when there isn't a military unit nearby.

Nonmilitary bomb squads recover an average of 400 pieces of military munitions a year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives - known by its clipped abbreviation, ATF. It has maintained a computer database of those recoveries since 2003.

Combined, military and nonmilitary bomb squads respond to 1,300 to 1,600 munitions discoveries a year, a figure based on confirmed recoveries and the Navy's estimate of total annual responses. That's an average of four to five times a day.

In the past four years, nonmilitary bomb squads recovered 2,500 grenades and 1,300 projectiles, ATF spokeswoman Sherry Mixell said.

"These items are extremely unstable and hazardous and should only be handled by a qualified unexploded-munitions expert," Mixell said. "They should not be collected as souvenirs."

In Hampton Roads last year, the Virginia State Police reported that several live World War II-era artillery shells were recovered from a Suffolk garage and that several white-phosphorous military flares were found in Williamsburg. White phosphorous, nicknamed Willy Pete, is a chemical that bursts into flames when exposed to air and continues to burn until used up. It causes deep and painful burns as it eats its way through human flesh.

Those discoveries were included in the ATF computer database, but not the Navy's.

The majority of the munitions recovered last year were decades old, with some dating to World War II, an analysis of the Navy's database shows.

Most of those munitions bear the hallmarks of souvenirs: found in attics, basements and garages after a veteran died, and some of them were of German or Japanese manufacture.

But some munitions recovered were relatively new, such as an armor-piercing anti-tank round found in the back of a car just purchased by a Texas senior citizen.

In another incident not recorded in the Navy's database, four relatively new anti-tank rockets were found by a Kentucky game warden in November in a deer hunter's truck, not far from the Army's Fort Campbell. They were blown up at the post's training range.

Some 'walk off'

Some of the newer munitions might have "walked off" training ranges as souvenirs or might have been taken by soldiers who didn't want to deal with the time-consuming paperwork required to turn in unused munitions. The latter has been a longstanding concern in the military, resulting in periodic clampdowns on training-range inventory.

"You're lugging a pack full of this stuff all day, and you have to decide whether to stand in line for two hours to turn it in or dump it into a hole or save it for use later. What are you going to do?" asked Siegel, of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight. "It's understandable. It's not right, but it's understandable."

Base commanders across the country routinely set aside a trash bin for service members to drop off - no questions asked - munitions issued but not used during training exercises. These amnesty programs have been somewhat successful, judging by the amount of munitions returned that could otherwise have made its way off base, munitions experts said.

Last month, the Army sent out its latest servicewide alert, telling officers to redouble efforts to accurately account for all munitions issued for training or for use in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such alerts come from time to time.

As military deployments have increased in the past few years, so has the amount of munitions found in homes or public places, according to the directive.

"Nothing is more tragic and unnecessary than a soldier, dependent or civilian maimed or killed by an unauthorized wartime or training souvenir," the alert said.

On May 7 in Barstow, Calif., two scrap-metal dealers died when what appears to have been a LAW anti-tank rocket exploded in their faces as they were trying to disassemble it. Investigators don't know how they obtained the weapon or why they were taking it apart.

Two children - ages 7 and 8 - were blown up in August in Bakersfield, Calif. They were playing with a grenade that the owner thought was harmless. He'd had it for decades. Four other kids were injured - several seriously. The oldest was 12.

The Bakersfield Police Department issued a plea for the public to report any munitions squirreled away in homes. It received 20 calls within two weeks. In one house, police found two mortar rounds and two rockets. They were live.

"Although it certainly was a tragedy, it was somewhat of a learning experience for all of us," police Detective Greg Terry said. "Most people didn't have any knowledge of what they had. They didn't know if it was safe or not. Ask the question, for the sake of your family. It's imperative."

At the request of the Daily Press, the Army released a month's worth of its recent bomb squad responses - from the end of March to the beginning of May - omitting the locations.

In those 38 days, the Army went out on 30 calls and recovered eight grenades (one during a domestic dispute), one artillery shell, 17 anti-tank rounds, 429 military fuses and a LAW anti-tank rocket found at a flea market.

Also found were 127 vials full of chemical-warfare agents. The vials were in detection kits last used in 1969. A Boy Scout found them while he was digging on an old bombing range.

The bomb squad also noticed three 6-pound napalm bombs nearby. It destroyed them.

Getting the word out

Solutions aren't easy, but some are being pursued.

The Pentagon is preparing a campaign aimed at getting war souvenirs out of veterans' hands. The plan is to send out warning pamphlets in military magazine subscriptions and Veteran Affairs Department mailings - and perhaps with military retirement checks.

The pamphlets will spell out the dangers posed by munitions and highlight a plea to call the local police, who in turn would summon the closest military bomb squad to dispose of the munitions.

The message is this: The public should consider all munitions to be dangerous, no matter how old they are or how harmless they appear to be.

"The last thing we want is for someone who has answered the nation's call to duty to have to live with injuring or killing a family member, a friend or a neighbor because they thought a munition taken as a souvenir was safe," said Addison Davis, an assistant Army secretary.

"If you have one, call 911 to have it returned to (military) control for destruction. Keeping munitions as souvenirs is dangerous and sometimes deadly."

The Pentagon is also trying to determine where munitions were dumped in the ocean long ago. It was ordered by Congress last year to find them and determine how to remove them. The Navy and Army routinely conducted large-scale munitions dumping until the 1970s, and the locations aren't always marked on nautical charts. Several munitions recovered last year were pulled up off the ocean floor.

The depth charge brought up by the Bald Eagle II wasn't marked on charts. It was found within a few miles of two other known underwater munitions hazards.

One is marked on nautical charts as the location of "explosives jettisoned in 1966." The other is where mustard-gas-filled artillery shells were dredged up by a claming operation in 2004 and found in crushed-clamshell driveways in Delaware.

That was when Pentagon officials began to contemplate a nationwide database of munitions discoveries. Patterns could be detected in time for emergency-responders to ferret out munitions problems, instead of just reacting to them.

Here was the thinking, using the clamshell example: A central repository of military bomb squad reports might have exposed a trend of munitions found in driveways. It might have revealed that they were all found in clamshell driveways. That information could have lead to a search of clam-processing plants, which might have caught some of the dredged-up munitions before they were delivered to people's homes.

The Navy was put in charge of creating and maintaining the servicewide database. Until then, each military branch kept its own records at a regional or local level. Only the Air Force computerized its EOD records. There had been no way to track trends comprehensively servicewide.

Once the backlog of bomb squad incident reports are cleared and future incidents are inputted immediately into the Navy's database, the Pentagon hopes, it will have an effective early-warning system.

In the meantime, the offshore location of the depth charge pulled up by the Bald Eagle II has been sent to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, to be included on nautical charts as a known hazard area.

"You never know what these guys on boats are going to pull up," Hampton fire Capt. Michael Birdsong said.

"It was the first time I've seen anything like that and hopefully the last."

Staff researcher Tracy Sorensen contributed to this report.