Posted on 04/01/2016 7:22:11 PM PDT by Morgana
HOT SPRINGS, Ark. — Police in Hot Springs, Arkansas, have evacuated about 20 homes after a man mistook a Civil War-era landmine for a cannonball and took it home.
Police say as of about 4 p.m. Thursday that the U.S. Air Force Bomb Squad was looking for a place to explode the ordinance.
Police spokesman Cpl. Kirk Zaner said a Hot Springs man dug up what he thought was a cannonball near Danville. The man put the 32-pound landmine in the back of his pickup and drove about 65 miles home.
After researching pictures of Civil War-era weapons, the man called police to say he thought he found a landmine with a pressure sensor fuse. Zanier says the Air Force bomb squad X-rayed the device and found what could be explosives inside.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Cut the blue wire.
Oops.
thanks for posting this.
The South will rise again.
What are the odds it would go off after all these years?
Good thing to know.
I’ll be extra careful the next time I bring A CANNON BALL HOME!
The stupid.
IT’S SPREADING.
Jedi.
“What are the odds it would go off after all these years?”
That all dep-—
One lucky redneck right there.
L
My cousin gave me an old powder horn from the early 1800s years ago. It was in bad shape, but what the heck, I took it. I got to digging around in it with a stick and the dam thing had some powder in it. So I got all the powder out and thought I wanted to see if it would still burn. It did, and dam good too. WOW. I burned a good portion of my hair off my arm.
They used to call them torpedos back then. Why? I dunno.
Fair. A man was killed some years back by a cannon shell that was live and over 150 years old.
When will this country be healed of this conflict?
Did it have a Confederate Flag painted on it?
Amazing that it could be viable after 150 years. One might imagine that there are live munitions still from World War I and World War II somewhere out there, waiting to be discovered (one way or another).
No, the red one.
No “i” in ordnance ..... has to be inert ....< / sarcasm>
Lots of Civil War era cannonballs still lurk out there .... render safe is / was usually just counter charge em with a quarter pound of C4 and blow em in place (BIP)....
Old blackpowder is nothing to dink around with. Gets, wet, dry, wet etc and is unstable as hell over time. Not as bad as old dynamite but same level of instability .
Stay Safe !
Another old man claimed once in a while they would find an un-exploded one, and he said they had a special place in a pile of rocks for them in a fence row for them.
My gut feeling is the confederates had camps south of town at one point because of a spring fed creek and used the farm land for cannon shooting practice being their was no know fighting on the land as far as I know off.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.