A rusty, World War II-era bomb was found washed up on Pajaro Dunes, a beach between Santa Cruz and Monterey on the California coastline on New Year's Eve.
Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office said in a statement on Monday that its bomb disposal team was called out to the coast after recent storms washed up "what was determined to be an inert military ordinance."
California and other West Coast states have been impacted by a series of winter storms coming off the Pacific Ocean, with more expected to follow.
The bomb, covered in barnacles and sea debris, was deemed safe and later removed from the beach. The Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office said personnel from Travis Air Force Base, located to the north between San Francisco and Sacramento, also responded to collect the ordinance for disposal.
A spokesperson for Travis Air Force Base confirmed its bomb disposal team had been requested to evaluate the ordinance. They told Newsweek it had determined to be a Mk 15, Mod 2 Navy practice bomb used during World War II.
"After safely performing an on-site visual inspection and x-ray scan, the item was deemed free of explosives and safe to transport," the spokesperson said. "It is currently being retained with Travis EOD [Explosive Ordnance Disposal] and will remain in place to prevent future concerns."
Newsweek also reached out to the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office via email for comment on Tuesday.
Cases of bombs turning up on American shores are relatively rare. In 2002, the U.S. Navy's Explosive Ordnance Disposal Detachment found a field of underwater munitions off the coast of Oahu, Hawaii, including artillery shells, mines, mortars and small arms munitions. The Department of Defense said the materiel appeared to be "discarded rather than fired," though.
In 2019, military personnel were dispatched to Fairbanks, Alaska, to safely detonate an unexploded aerial munition found in a resident's home.
Munitions from the American Civil War are also still occasionally found on U.S. soil. According to a Spartanburg Herald-Journal report from the time, in 1999, a cannonball dropped from a tree in Chaffin's Bluff, Virginia, 10 miles south of Richmond and near the site of one of the major Civil War battles in 1864.
The number of unexploded ordinances tends to be a lot higher in areas such as Europe, which was prone to intense aerial bombardment during World War II.
In Britain, which suffered the Blitz bombing campaign by the German Luftwaffe between 1940 and 1941, unexploded ordinances are regularly found in waterways like the River Thames in London—most recently in December 2019. In 2023, munitions from both World Wars were found in the river in Oxford.
In a 2020 report, the U.K. government estimated that there were half a million unexploded munitions weighing a combined 100,000 tons in the waters surrounding Britain.
Update 1/3/24, 3:00 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include comment from a Travis Air Force Base spokesperson and further details.
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Aleks Phillips is a Newsweek U.S. News Reporter based in London. His focus is on U.S. politics and the environment. ... Read more
