WWII bombs close down boat harbour

by Michael Verdon/IBI Magazine on 7 May 2004 Baltimore's highly popular Inner Harbor was closed today to boaters because nine bombs, weighing from 400 to 4,000 lbs., were discovered near an old shipyard site.

The bombs were not the work of foreign terrorists, however, but instead were World War II-era munitions that had been buried for over 50 years.

‘It's significant,’ Lt. Andrew Ely, a Coast Guard spokesman, told the Baltimore Sun. He said the Patapsco River above the Harbor Tunnel - from Fairfield to Lazaretto Point - was part of the zone where vessels are being prohibited, and that the danger area extends to the waters off Fort McHenry.

Besides the affected boaters and businesses nearby, the ban also prevents air traffic overhead and shuts off local roads and even some highways.

Ely said that there was no certainty of the danger posed by the bombs and their triggering devices. ‘The military is here to determine if the remaining ordnance is live, and if there are any other buried ordnance in the area,’ added a Maryland official.

A construction worker on a backhoe dug out a long, rusted metallic object yesterday, and discovered it was a bomb.

According to the Sun, local officials were trying to determine if the bombs had come from the 1946-built aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea or other military ships scrapped over the decades along the industrial Fairfield waterfront.

The former shipyard is next to a lot where thousands of Toyota vans are parked after being unloaded from cargo ships.

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