Pop-up storms are common on hot afternoons in the South, but one turned alarming for a North Carolina couple when their yard had to be quarantined.
It was required after an old grenade mysteriously washed up in a ditch, according to the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office.
The discovery was reported around 8:30 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 4, outside a home on Smith Acres Road in Eden, the sheriff’s office said in a news release. Eden is about a 130-mile drive northeast from Charlotte, near the Virginia state line.
“The grenade was located along with several rocks that apparently washed up from a heavy downpour of rain the previous day,” the sheriff’s office said. “The grenade appeared to be old, rusted, and still had the pin in it.”
A photo posted on Facebook shows it had been washed clean of mud and was round, like a vintage M-67 Baseball Fragmentation Grenade.
Once the area was put under quarantine, the sheriff’s office reached out for explosives experts from surrounding law enforcement agencies.
The Greensboro Police Department Bomb Squad sent a team to study the situation and “retrieved the grenade for safe disposal,” the sheriff’s office said.
Rockingham County officials did not offer ideas on where it originated, and it’s unclear if the grenade was live or a training dummy.
Such vintage weaponry is typically detonated under controlled circumstances by bomb squads.
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