Discovery of old ammunition halts work along beach
Atlantic City Press /  The Associated Press
Published: Tuesday, March 6, 2007

SURF CITY, N.J. (AP) - Come to the Jersey shore and have a blast!
That could become the region's new motto, particularly after unexploded ammunition from long-ago wars recently surfaced in Ocean County.

Old ammunition from World War II shut down a section of beach replenishment work on Long Beach Island Monday - the same day that an unexploded cannonball a man found elsewhere in the county, and took home, caused an evacuation requiring a bomb squad.

Following the discovery of five World War II bomb fuses in the sand dredged up from offshore, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has closed a section of the Surf City's beach that's in the process of being restored.

A resident with a metal detector found the first fuse Friday morning. Since then, another resident and beach workers found four more believed to be from American explosives.

"Right now with this, it makes me very concerned about the safety of the beachgoers," Long Beach Township resident Peter Trainor told the Asbury Park Press for Tuesday's newspapers.
Ed Voigt, an Army Corps spokesman, said there is no danger to the public, but added it could take weeks to check the beach completely. That work should be done before summer, he said.

The fuses are 1 to 2 inches in diameter and 9 inches long. They still contain powder, but would need to be struck to activate, authorities said.

"In Atlantic waters it's not rare," Voigt said. "We do actually have in some projects, in Delaware, where we actually had screens on the intake pipe because we already knew there was a likelihood of finding (ordnance) there."

However, he said there was "no prior evidence of anything like that in this area."

In an unrelated incident, a bomb squad on Monday had to dispose of an old cannonball, possibly hundreds of years old, that a Seaside Park man found near the Toms River and took home with him.

Sean DeGroot told the newspaper he found the cannonball buried under two feet of sand Friday in South Toms River while using a metal detector.

He put the ball in a bucket of water, placed it in his truck and took it home, where he started poking at it with a butter knife.

"I was taking the rusted iron off, and then I found a fuse in it," DeGroot said. He said he could "smell the gunpowder."

He researched the device on the Internet, found instructions to call the Navy, and did so. That resulted in bomb squads from the State Police and Earle Naval Weapons Station in Colts Neck to respond and evacuate the area near his apartment while the cannonball was removed.

J. Mark Mutter, a local historian, said the cannonball could have been used when the British attacked the Toms River in 1778 or 1782. Or, he said it could have been thrown overboard from a ship which was too heavy to move in a low tide on the river.