A loud explosion on Poplar Bluff’s south side Wednesday afternoon may have shook up some residents, but the cause is what Police Chief Danny Whiteley considers somewhat routine.
It turned out to be two military grenades found recently, which were disposed of by members of the Southeast Missouri Bomb Squad at the city leaf and limb disposal site.
“Somebody found some, and one appeared to be live. The other could have been,” said Whiteley.
One of the grenades was found in a city residence earlier this week, and the other turned up in a collection of items the next day that had been turned into a local resale shop. Officials declined to name the resale shop.
“They both just happened to come in within a day of each other, so they got rid of them at one time,” Whiteley said. “It was a routine disposal.”
Such potentially dangerous finds, Whiteley said, happen occasionally.
“People find them sometimes after somebody passes away, or they will find them in an old storage shed. They come across them from time to time,” he said.
When they are turned into authorities, he said, it is “a lot safer to go ahead and detonate them instead of trying to disarm them.”
Detonation, Whiteley said, “takes any doubt out as to whether or not it went off.”