Shell found in backyard of Hamilton home
HAMILTON — An east end Hamilton couple is happy to be uninjured, but still perplexed, about the discovery of an apparently live artillery shell in their backyard.
Adrienne Coletto says she and her husband Dwayne Keith were digging holes for fence posts at 5:30 p.m. Monday when his shovel clanged on a rusted metal object about a foot below the surface.
After they dug it out, they realized they had come upon some kind of bomb.
“We moved it over onto the grass and stared at it for a bit and called a friend who is on the police force.”
The next thing they knew, three cruisers were in front of their house and the Hamilton police emergency response unit was called.
They were told to evacuate the area, along with neighbours on either side of their house on Hixon Road while the device was removed. By 8:20 p.m., the families were permitted to return to their homes.
Hamilton police spokesperson Lorraine Edwards said the 30 cm-by-10 cm shell had no markings on it and police bomb experts were unable to determine from what period of time it was manufactured, only that it was “very old.”
The shell was to be passed onto the Department of National Defence, which is the protocol when historical military armaments and shells are found, Edwards said.
“With my husband hitting it with a shovel, thank God it didn’t go off,” said Coletto, 38, who has lived at the house for nine years. “We really have no idea how it ended up in our backyard.
“I can’t imagine someone burying it because it is such a neat object and at the same time why would anyone purposely bury something that could explode?”
Coletto said she believes it had shrapnel inside because “by rolling it you could hear the metal moving around that sounded like ball bearings.”
Police told her “the shell was live but they could not say whether it could detonate.”
She said with various landscaping over the years, nearly the entire backyard had been dug up with nothing unusual found. The area where the fence will be built was the only section that had been untouched until Monday.
The couple’s house was built in 1912 and was part of a former farm near the Red Hill Creek.
Edwards said police from time to time receive calls about the discovery of munitions.
Typically, the object was collected by someone interested in military history and discarded or forgotten about.
However, in this case it’s not clear what happened.