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A dog walker and his friend chanced across the ordnance while going for a midnight stroll on Wurtulla Beach.
The unexploded bomb Sean Mackney found during a midnight beach walk. Residents of a busy Queensland coastal region woke in shock after hearing an explosion at about 4am.
A man walking his dog with a friend discovered the unexploded ordnance on a Sunshine Coast beach at about midnight. Residents on Queensland's Sunshine Coast were woken in shock by an early morning blast when the Defence Force detonated an unexploded World War II-era shell found on a beach. Police were called to Wurtulla Beach just before midnight after Sean Mackney's friend discovered an object at the base of a sand dune while they were walking his dog.
Curious, Mr Mackney picked up the object before realising what it was.
"I didn't really know what to do … we called the police and they were down there pretty quick. Police officers attended and guarded the site until Department of Defence personnel arrived. A Defence spokesman confirmed the unexploded ordnance was "identified as a 25-pound High Explosive projectile from World War II". Defence bomb squad personnel detonated the 11-kilogram device at about 4am.
The 25-pounder artillery shells were used during World War II. The yellow one, second from right, is similar to the one found on the Sunshine Coast.
"I thought maybe a bad car accident or something … it sounded like something really big had dropped onto cement," she said. "I woke my husband but he hadn't heard it. My dog didn't bark, which threw me off as well. The region was home to a live firing site during World War II and the Wurtulla are is listed on the Defence website as having substantial potential for unexploded ordnance.
Unexploded ordnance is a risk on the Sunshine Coast. The red areas indicate "substantial potential" of the presence of a device.. The 25-pounder was "the primary artillery piece of the Commonwealth Forces until the 1960s", according to the Defence department. The "high explosive" variant was about 30 centimetres long and contained a nose fuse and up to 900 grams of amatol — a mix of TNT and ammonium nitrate.
"Unexploded items of this type are most often found in/near areas used by the Army for artillery practices, typically on the ground surface up to 1.5 metres deep," the Defence website says. Last year officials
Sunshine Coast Explosion Wurtulla Explosion World War Two Bomb Beach Bomb Found Bomb Squad Currimundi Bomb Sunshine Coast Bomb Wwii Beach Bomb
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