Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Have you dug through your old junk lately?

It's surprising what you can find. This find was just 10 miles from me.

BUHL • When a family found 47 bazooka rounds stashed on their property, they did exactly what they should have: Left them alone and called the police.
It’s not uncommon for people cleaning out a garage or old storage shed to stumble across old explosives, said sheriff’s office spokeswoman Lori Stewart.

Whether it’s abandoned blasting caps left over from a previous construction site or a family member’s old war memento, Stewart said the best thing to do is not to move it and to call the police.

“That is exactly what happened here,” Stewart said. “Luckily, the person who found them was smart enough to recognize it was something they shouldn’t be messing with.”

Finding old explosives is fairly common in Buhl in particular, she said.

“This isn’t the first time we’ve had to deal with something like this in the Buhl area,” she said. “I think it is all the big properties that have been in families for generations. They have multiple buildings and trailers around them and you don’t know what’s been stored.”

The 62-year-old shells were found in the base of an old tent trailer Tuesday.

“We don’t really know how long they have been there or who knew about them,” Stewart said.

A deputy arrived at the house on Carter Pack Road about 11:30 a.m. and called the Twin Falls Police Department Bomb Squad to handle the shells.

Because the bazooka shells are military property, the police bomb squad was not allowed to detonate them and had to call a bomb squad from the Air Force base in Mountain Home. The Mountain Home crew arrived shortly before 2:30 p.m.

But then an electrical storm forced everyone retreat from the trailer for an hour because of the threat of static electricity forming while handling the rounds.

Once the storm passed, the bomb squads took the shells into a field and detonate them about 7:30 p.m.

on a similar note, several years ago no far from where I live a pipeline crew stumbled onto a forgotten WWII bombing range used for practice for Key Field in Meridian.


News Story

I'd have liked to have seen those USAF guys shoot one into that lawnmower.

Blue paint on the projectile generally means practice rounds or dummy rounds.

I hope they had the presence of mind to look for the Launcher!


Yep looks to be the non explosive practice rounds.
I got to fire and qualify with the 3.5" rocket launcher, what a hoot!
They had a few early to mid fifties Buick or Oldsmobiles for targets at the range.
Those practice rounds had no problem penetrating both doors, went through like it was cardboard! Good thing they had a nice berm behind.
I was really surprised how accurate they were, I had no problem hitting the brake drums at 100 meters so that's roughly sub 10 MOA! LOL!

Not necessarily safe but they look like practice rounds.

Why can't I ever find goodies like that? Damn.

Be glad you don't find that kind of thing, if your luck is like mine you would blow your legs off.

had a neighbor that died. at the estate auction we found a foot locker full of 50% sticks of dynamite. tried to get the auctioneer to sell them but the CS called the bomb squad instead.40 dufasses showed up and evacuated everyone within 2 miles. ran around bumping into each other trying to figure out who had jurisdiction then took the goodies out into a field 200 yards from homes and touched it off. broke every window within a quarter mile! man I hated to see that stuff go to waste.

Today that's true. I think standard ordnance markings for all the branches was adopted in 1948 and before that who knows what blue means.

I must admit if I'd found those and a launcher, well the bomb squad wouldn't have been called

Then again I'm just old enough to appreciate that explosives shouldn't be messed with, and old explosives absolutely shouldn't be messed with.

I wash my junk from time-to-time, but never had a need to dig through.

Sorry for the hijack.








sort of.

About 20 years ago, a guy I didn't know very well, showed me an old Japanese grenade he'd got from somewhere.

It was leaking something viscous into the bottom of the box.

Trouble with the old stuff is it could be fine, it could be a dud, or it could seemingly have a mind of it's own and go off with the slightest little bump.

You'll notice that the article in the OP says that the bomb squad backed off when a thunderstorm moved through. They also respect old stuff.

Knew an EOD guy at DLI. Craziest dude I ever met and that included a BUDs instructor.