In case you were looking for a little more normalcy in your life today, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Because something strange happened early Sunday morning in the United States. Yes, sure enough, it happened in Florida. “What is it this time?” you may ask? “It’s not another alligator thing or meth head or…meth head alligator thing, is it?” Nope, this time it’s just some old, potentially explosive military ordnance washing up on the shore.
As reported by NBC News, on April 4th at approximately 2:30 a.m., a deputy from the Broward Sheriff’s Office called to report an object washed ashore that they noticed while on patrol. The spherical device with its prong-like appendages looks about as much like a naval mine as you would guess one could look like.
The device did have the word “inert” printed on the side of it, indicating it was likely some kind of a training device. Naturally, the Sheriff’s Office wanted to be on the safe side of things and contacted a bomb squad as well as the Air Force to help with the matter. After determining that the device was indeed inert, it was safely taken away.
This event is more common than you may think. In 2018, the Charlotte Observer newspaper for North Carolina published a piece about a rusted mine that washed up on the shore line of Cape Hatteras. What’s more, they go to the state that earlier in the year, a live ordnance was found in North Topsail Beach, and armor-piercing rounds were found buried at Topsail Island. Meanwhile in 2017, at least four more old explosive devices had washed up along the shore.
So as much as we can kind of chuckle about weird Florida news, there’s a sadly tragic undercurrent to all this, and “undercurrent” is used deliberately in this sense. Often times, things from the past that we thought we left out to sea will figuratively and literally wash back ashore. Fortunately, there were no tragic consequences to it this time.
