By Nate Jones

Staff Writer 

Cape Elizabeth Police Chief Neil Williams said he would not disclose the name of the resident who drove to the police station with a rusty grenade in his car last week. 

“He claimed his father brought [the grenade] back from World War I, and I don’t have anything to dispute that,” Portland Bomb Squad member Ted Ross said. “It was a typical pineapple-looking grenade. It displayed corrosion and was obviously very old.”

Williams said the resident left the explosive in his vehicle, walked into the station and told officers he wanted to dispose of it. After taking a look at the grenade, Williams said schools and nearby residents were notified of the presence of an explosive device and officers redirected traffic from Jordan Way to keep the grenade as isolated as possible while the bomb squad was en route to the station from Portland. 

Once they arrived, Ross said the bomb squad quickly discovered that the middle of the  grenade had not been removed, or “cored out,” like some decorative replicas.  

“We treat everything as if there’s a possibility of an explosion,” he said. “But we were not happy when we saw it wasn’t cored out.”

The apparent age of the grenade made the bomb squad even more nervous, as Ross explained many of the chemicals used in similar devices, such as dynamite, become more volatile after they have been stored for a long time.

“For whatever reason people like to horde dynamite,” he said. “Over time it will crystallize and become highly unstable. It looks like rock candy, but it’s nitro-glycerin.”

The bomb squad removed the corroded grenade from the car and placed it in the back of a town dump truck filled with sand and quickly put a “blast blanket” over it in case it exploded while being transported to a nearby sand pit, Williams said. 

Whether or not the grenade could have gone off will remain a mystery; Ross said it was destroyed at the pit by a charge the bomb squad detonated next to it.

“We don’t just remove the pin,” he said. “We set a charge where we control the detonator.”

Williams said he “couldn’t recall” any similar event during his time as chief, although it isn’t uncommon for residents to bring in fireworks or ammunition for police to destroy, he said. 

“Last year some pipe bombs were found on the beach but it wasn’t a large device,” he said. “We’ve never had a real device such as a grenade brought to us.”

It wasn’t the first time the bomb squad had seen live ordnance; construction crews often working on islands in Casco Bay will dig up old weapons and ammunition near old military forts, Ross said. Less professionally made devices such as pipe or chemical bombs can be just as dangerous, Ross said. 

“Just five days ago we were in Falmouth where there was concern of an explosion,” he said. “We found a [homemade] acid bomb in a mailbox.”

Williams and Ross both said the proper thing to do when a possible explosive is discovered is to call the local police and wait for their response. 

“The first thing you should do is remove people from the item, not the other way around,” Ross said. “Putting it in your car and driving it is not the right thing to do; people just don’t think.”