Veterans tell me something

dwna1a

dwna1a

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Apr 23, 2012
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James River
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We get all sorts of crazy things here after it has rained as much and hard as it has. Today was the craziest yet. The guy that metal detects in our fields found a hand grenade. It was still live! They had to blow it up in place!

Vets... were these things really that loud and the pressure wave really that strong? You are the only ones I can think to ask. Scared the living life out of me
 
dwna1a said:
We get all sorts of crazy things here after it has rained as much and hard as it has. Today was the craziest yet. The guy that metal detects in our fields found a hand grenade. It was still live! They had to blow it up in place!

Vets... were these things really that loud and the pressure wave really that strong? You are the only ones I can think to ask. Scared the living life out of me
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There are many different kinds of Grenades. Fragmentation grenades, riot grenades, white phosphorous, concussion types.... I think it’s just safer to blast in place rather than take the risk of trying to move without knowing how stable it is. The wp grenade was an impressive thing to see. Watched one burn through the top of engine block straight through to the bottom.
 
dwna1a said:
We get all sorts of crazy things here after it has rained as much and hard as it has. Today was the craziest yet. The guy that metal detects in our fields found a hand grenade. It was still live! They had to blow it up in place!

Vets... were these things really that loud and the pressure wave really that strong? You are the only ones I can think to ask. Scared the living life out of me
Click to expand...
Was it shaped like a baseball? That's a modern concussion grenade and has a 5m kill radius and a 15m maiming radius. They kill with the concussion versus pieces from the fragmentation grenade aka Pineapple from WW2 etc. Pretty odd for finding in a field around us!
 
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When soldiers came back from WWII some brought souvenirs home. One grocery store we went to in a small town near the cottage the owner had a hand grenade as a paper weight. I remember my father and him talking about it in mid 50ies. They talked about how they disarmed it so it had no expulsive in it. Store long gone and both my father and owner are dead. So I can see the possibility of a grenade being discarded in a field, stream or lake by some one who had no idea what to do with it.
 
dwna1a said:
We get all sorts of crazy things here after it has rained as much and hard as it has. Today was the craziest yet. The guy that metal detects in our fields found a hand grenade. It was still live! They had to blow it up in place!

Vets... were these things really that loud and the pressure wave really that strong? You are the only ones I can think to ask. Scared the living life out of me
Click to expand...

If you were nearby and referring to the the disposal activity, you likely heard the C4 detonation.
EOD teams normally use C4 as itself is very stable, it also has a high temperature cutting action that can burn thru the outer steel casing of old ordnance to ignite any remaining internal explosives. I've seen it used on old mines that fishing trawlers would occasional catch on the east coast.
 
It looked like a small pineapple or a large pine cone. It was about 200 or 300 yards across a open field. Damn it was loud
 
dwna1a said:
It looked like a small pineapple or a large pine cone. It was about 200 or 300 yards across a open field. Damn it was loud
Click to expand...
I read about it last night. It was a WWII pineapple grenade. I think we heard them detonate it. Was it early evening when they did it?
I also read about the poor kid that got killed in VA on Dec 23. Apparently an antique shop in the Carolinas sold a few of the same WWII grenades thinking they were decommissioned. Obviously they weren't. The ATF found the other ones that were sold. I had a pineapple grenade growing up. It was obviously dead because a hole had been drilled in the bottom so nobody could put powder back in it. Of course I put a bolt in it to make it look more real. I'm sure I still have it somewhere in a box...
 
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HawkX66 said:
I read about it last night. It was a WWII pineapple grenade. I think we heard them detonate it. Was it early evening when they did it?
I also read about the poor kid that got killed in VA on Dec 23. Apparently an antique shop in the Carolinas sold a few of the same WWII grenades thinking they were decommissioned. Obviously they weren't. The ATF found the other ones that were sold. I had a pineapple grenade growing up. It was obviously dead because a hole had been drilled in the bottom so nobody could put powder back in it. Of course I put a bolt in it to make it look more real. I'm sure I still have it somewhere in a box...
Click to expand...
He found it before sunset but they didn’t blow it up till around 10pm
 
Where did you read about it? We haven’t seen anything about it yet
 
dwna1a said:
Where did you read about it? We haven’t seen anything about it yet
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My wife saw it on "Williamsburg News and Notes" It's a Facebook group. Local women were talking about it I guess.
 
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