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March 01, 2007
Hey Grandma! What's for Dinner?
NAPLES, Italy (Reuters) - A 74-year-old Italian grandmother who bought a sack of potatoes at the her local market found a live grenade among the spuds.
"I found a bomb in the potatoes," Olga Mauriello said in a telephone interview with Reuters.
"I went to the market to buy some potatoes and that's where the bomb was. But this bomb was covered in dirt, and I put it in water and got all dirt off. And then I realized 'It's a bomb'!"
Police said the pine cone-shaped grenade, which had no pin and was still active, was the same type used by U.S. soldiers in Europe in World War Two. Authorities believe the mix-up happened at a farm in France, where the grenade was plucked from the ground along with potatoes.
To the woman's relief, police and explosives experts in the small town of San Giorgio a Cremano, near Naples, recovered the grenade and safely detonated it on Wednesday.
But Mauriello was still shaking off her close brush with death. It didn't look like a potato and it was heavier than one. But what if she had cooked it?
"If I hadn't felt its weight, I wouldn't even have realized that it was a bomb," she said.
Posted by LindaSoG at March 1, 2007 06:05 AM
Comments
Think about how many times that grenade has been plowed, disked, harrowed and ran over before being picked up by the harvester. If memory serves me, that's 2-1/2 oz. of TNT that they were filled with, relatively safe stuff unless you beat on it with a hammer or try to bake it in an oven, the amazing thing is it was still viable after all these years, American made and well sealed. Yeah it could have messed up her kitchen. If you use your imagination and squint a bit you can see what would have happened to the lady if it had went off, just look at Max Cleland. She's lucky she cleaned it and realized what it was instead of just popping it into an oven.
Posted by: Jack at March 1, 2007 11:49 AM