USA TODAY International Edition
Sharks not bad enough; WWII bombs also a beach peril
If a spate of shark attacks this summer isn’t enough to keep you out of the water, here’s another peril to worry about at the beach: unexploded bombs.
A World War II- era shell forced beachgoers on the Gulf Coast near Tampa to evacuate the sands Sunday morning before the barnacle- covered bomb was detonated in a controlled explosion.
The good news: No one was hurt. The bad: This happens much more frequently than you might think.
Millions of unused bombs, also known as unexploded ordnance or UXO, lie in the waters off the U. S. coast, dumped by the military before the practice was banned in 1970 by the Pentagon.
Many UXOs are from World War II, when defense companies pumped out millions of bombs, shells and other explosives.
After the war, the Defense De- partment found itself with a huge excess of munitions, which it dumped onto the seafloor, usually more than 50 miles offshore. The practice continued with ordnance from the Korean and Vietnam wars until the Pentagon ban.
“The amount that has been dumped [ is] unbelievable,” former Texas A& M University oceanographer William Bryant told Fox News.
Bryant and A& M colleague Niall Slowey released a study in 2012 documenting the dump areas in the Gulf of Mexico, where they estimated there are at least 30 million pounds of bombs in seven main dump sites.
The Gulf isn’t the only place where bombs lurk.
A 2009 report to Congress listed military munition sea disposal locations in the USA from 1917 to 1970: 26 dump sites in the Northeast, 17 in the Southeast, nine in the West and 20 near Alaska and Hawaii, according to The Journal of ERW and Mine Action at James Madison University in Virginia.