Teenager finds WWII-era bomb

By Tom Davidson
Herald Staff Writer

EAST LACKAWANNOCK TOWNSHIP April 27, 2008 10:17 pm

— Warning: Don’t try this at home.
Sixteen-year-old Adam Bortz was out riding his four-wheeler Saturday evening in the shadow of the McCandless Ford-Mercury dealership outside Mercer.
“I got off of it,” he said, and was walking around the woods when he said he stumbled on what turned out to be a World War II-era mortar.
“I tripped over the fins,” of the partially-buried shell, he said.
“I loaded it up on the four-wheeler and brought it back home,” he said, dropping it once on the way.
Then he showed it to mom.
“She was like, ‘Where did you get that?’,” Adam, a sophomore at Mercer Area High School, said.
They loaded it into a pickup and took it about 2 miles to family friend Ron Bequeath.
“They weren’t sure what it was,” Bequeath said.
Bequeath said it looked like an old mortar and called state police.
“It had the potential of being real (armed),” Trooper Michael Fennell said.
Police called in a bomb squad from Harrisburg that arrived about 2 a.m., Fennell said.
“This is a pretty substantial size (mortar),” Fennell said.
The squad secured it and determined it was inert, Fennell said.
“In this case there appears to have been no danger,” he said.
The bomb squad took the mortar, which Fennell said weighed about 40 pounds.
“It would take a World War II vet” to identify it, he said.
Per procedure, it will be turned over to the Army today, he said.
Although it turned out OK, Fennell said this isn’t what to do if you find one of these relics of the past.
“Call us immediately,” Fennell said. “Don’t touch it. We have our own bomb squad.”