Vintage Bombs Are Unearthed at Old Shipyard in Baltimore

It was 7:25 a.m. Tuesday, under a sunny spring sky, when a construction worker in southern Baltimore started his day by throttling a backhoe to clear scrap metal from an old shipyard.

Using a claw-like device, he clutched and raised what looked like a pipe.

But as the dirt tumbled away, he could tell it was something unusual.

The man hopped down to take a closer look, and discovered it was a bomb, said Darlene Frank, director of communications for the Maryland Port Authority, which hired the worker.

Before long, four more bombs -- weighing as much as 4,000 pounds each -- had been found in the shipyard, and officials from the U.S. Department of Defense were investigating and clearing people out of a 2,000-foot potential blast zone.

None of the bombs detonated, and officials said Tuesday that they were trying to determine whether they might have come from the aircraft carrier Coral Sea, built in 1947, or other military ships that were scrapped over the decades along the industrial Fairfield waterfront.

The first bomb unearthed -- which appeared to be of a type dropped from airplanes -- had been defused before the workers with Potts & Callahan Contracting Co. discovered it, said Cpl. Greg Prioleau, spokesman for the Maryland Transportation Authority Police.

“The military is here to determine if the remaining ordnance is live, and if there are any other buried ordnance in the area,” said Prioleau, who talked to reporters outside the barbed-wire-topped gates to the Maryland Port Authority property.

The Maryland Port Administration bought the 10 acres of waterfront property on Nov. 3, 2000, from a ship-scrapping company, Kurt Iron & Metal Co., according to state records.

The state is working to clear the site, cover the polluted ground and then blacktop it so that it can be marketed to an industrial tenant.

It is viewed as potentially “hot property” because of its location on the waterfront, Frank said.

But a sign on the fence warns of the challenges to building on the site. “Contaminants of concern at the site include heavy metals, PCBs and petroleum-related compounds,” the sign says.

State officials planned to deal with pollution, but not explosives.

Although several Navy ships had been scrapped at the site since World War II, the state believed the military had been removing all of the bombs before turning the ships over to the salvage companies, state officials said.

“This is a surprise,” said Frank of the discovery of the bombs. “But given the history of the site, I guess it is to be expected.”

Land just east of the site was used by the Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard Inc. during World War II to build 384 lightly armed cargo vessels, called Liberty Ships.

Bethlehem Steel later sold the shipyard to Patapsco Scrap Corp., which worked until 1984 dismantling battleships and other Navy vessels, Keith said.

Just to the west, on the former Kurt Iron & Metal site where the bombs were found, scrap companies until the late 1990s ripped apart and sold parts of decommissioned military vessels, including the 972-foot-long Coral Sea.

The demolition of the old military ships at the site, by Seawitch Salvage Inc. and others, led to serious environmental problems, including several fires, pollution of the harbor and workers mishandling asbestos.

The owner of Seawitch Salvage, Kerry L. Ellis, was convicted in 1997 of federal safety and environmental violations.

“The USS Coral Sea was dismantled by Seawitch Salvage at this site, before the work was shut down because of environmental problems,” said Deidre McCabe, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Port Administration.

“But several other salvage companies also worked there,” McCabe said. None of them told the state they were handling explosives.

“The U.S. Navy was overseeing the dismantling of this ship throughout the entire process,’ McCabe said.