No-warning blast shattered Kilmore
February 1977
Three Kilmore Quay fishermen who diced with death for several hours and didn’t realise it until an explosion rocked their village last Thursday evening are lucky to be alive today.
They are Declan Bates, Wally Power, and John Hency, of the trawler ‘Marian’.
The boat was trawling off Minehead, close to the Waterford coast, when she picked up in the nets what proved to be the warhead of World War II torpedo. It was close to 3ft long and 18 ins. In diameter, and tapered to a point.
Rather gingerly, they took the missile on board, but continued trawling for a further sixteen hours before landing the object at Kilmore Quay.
The Gardaí and Army were then informed of the object. On Thursday evening, a group from the Army Ordnance Corps arrived to demolish the missile. The warhead was loaded onto a jeep and conveyed to a section of the Kilmore Burrow near Ballyteigue, where it was exploded.
But, nobody was prepared for the result which followed the explosion. Apparently, the warhead contained much more explosive than was thought. First of all, it blew a good-sized crater in the ground, rocked houses all over the area, and the detonation was heard several miles away.
A number of houses had panes of glass blown out. In all, about twelve houses sustained some degree of damage.
For instance, a window and door in the residence of Garda James Sullivan, about 600 yards from the scene, were damaged. Three windows in the residence of Mr and Mrs Paul Cullen, a mile and a half away, were blown out.
Mrs Bebe Bates, Ballyteigue, said she was in the kitchen with her two children, Simon (one year old) and Sinéad (four years) when she heard a terrific blast, followed by a crash of glass. She discovered that the large half-inch plate glass window in the sitting room had been blown in. ‘We were all scared. We thought it was an earthquake and the whole house would come toppling down on top of us,’ she said.
They had just come back from a birthday party in a neighbour’s house, she said, and normally the children would have been gazing out through the sitting room window, watching and waiting for their daddy to come home. ‘The birthday party saved us,’ she said.
Mrs Molly Bates, Crossfarnogue, was watching the television with her two children – John (2) and Mary (5) – when they heard this awful bang. She thought it was thunder, but realised it wasn’t when three of her large-sized windows were blown out. She saw a cloud of smoke rise into the air across the Burrow, but wasn’t aware of what exactly had happened until later.
The shock was the worst, she said. The little fellow was very upset, and he finally decided that ‘the monster they had been watching on the television had done it’. Mary was not bad, she added.
She also said that night was ‘pretty rough’, as the family had to sleep with their three windows boarded up.