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By Jack Beresford
Senior Reporter
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The challenges of moving took an unexpected turn for Mat Reichardt and his family when he found something unusual beside their new home: a grenade.
“The previous owner, who I never met, was an electrician. He was very diligent about leaving me instructions all over the house,” Reichardt, from Portland, Oregon, told Newsweek. “Having said all that, the former owner missed two things. First, he never told me where the shut-off valve for the outdoor spigots is. Second, he left a grenade on the side of the house.”
Reichardt was searching for the spigot shut-off valve when he made the explosive discovery.
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“While I was outside looking for it, I decided to check a rusty old capped pipe that I had overlooked in all my previous attempts,” he said. “To my surprise, it lifted right up. It was a canister, not a pipe. I took the lid off and recognized the pin and fuse.”
It had been 20 years since Reichardt had last played a video game, but he immediately recognized what was in his hands, having seen something similar while playing Battlefield on his old Xbox many moons ago.
“I knew from video games that it could have been a flash, smoke, or thermite grenade,” he said. “Then I thought, ‘I should probably call the police.’”
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Reichardt was right to call the authorities.
Robert Burrell is a senior research fellow at the University of South Florida Global and National Security Institute. He is also a retired U.S. Marine with combat experience and an expert in military science.
When presented with photographs of the discovery that Reichardt shared with Newsweek, Burrell identified the grenade as most likely a U.S. military grenade equipped with an M201A1 fuze. He said the fuze pictured is used for ignition in both the M18 colored-smoke grenade and the AN-M14 thermite incendiary grenade, and that the design dates back to at least the 1950s.
“The AN-M14 contains a thermite composition capable of producing temperatures exceeding 4,000°F, making it particularly hazardous,” Burrell told Newsweek.
“The deteriorated condition of the container suggests prolonged environmental exposure. But that doesn't make the device inert.”
Burrell said anyone who finds a munition of this kind should consider it “potentially live and extremely dangerous.”
“Stop handling or moving it immediately, keep others away, and contact the local police department to request an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) assessment,” he said.
Reichardt initially called the police department's non-emergency line after finding the grenade. The two officers who subsequently arrived decided to call in a bomb squad.
“They taped off the entire house and blocked the street, questioned me, then set an X-ray device next to the grenade,” Reichardt said. “That fed images into a computer in their truck, where they determined it was a smoke grenade. Since it was military-issued, they said that, per protocol, they had to send it to a nearby military base for proper disposal.”
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Reichardt is at a loss to explain how or why the smoke grenade ended up beside the house.
“My speculation is that it had something to do with intruder preparedness,” he said. “That's complete speculation, though, only based on the fact that he seemed prepared for everything else.”
In truth, Reichardt is surprised he didn't feel more freaked out about what happened, but at the time, he said it felt like “the whole situation was intertwined with my normal life operations.”
“At one point, I had to ask the police to unblock the road so I could go pick my daughter up from school,” he said. “On the way home, my daughter said she really, really needed to use the bathroom, so I had to explain to a 6-year-old that there was a bomb squad and police officers who wouldn't let us into the house and say, ‘Hopefully by the time we get home, they'll let us back in.’”
He also works remotely from home and was more concerned about what his new neighbors thought as they walked by a house that, in his words, “looked like a murder scene.”
“I was scrambling to catch them and let them know the situation,” he said.
Now it's something he can look back on and laugh about.
“Hopefully that was the last grenade on the property,” Reichardt said.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Marc Vargas and Emma Lee-Sang
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