A local resident cleaning up garbage near Solsqua-Sicamous Road needed more than a garbage bag when he found what appeared to be a military tank projectile.
For years people have been illegally dumping waste in and around Hallfish Road resident Ivan Munro’s rural Sicamous neighbourhood. After seeing neighbour, Patty Duffield voluntarily pick up some of that garbage, left in ditches along the largely unpopulated road that leads off Cambie-Solsqua Road towards the Eagle River, he decided to do the same.
“I ran into Patty and she was doing it and that kind of tweaked my guilt,” said Munro. “She likes to go out and walk her dog and run and she just has been getting sickened by all the trash in the ditches.”
So on Monday, March 7, Munro was busy cleaning out ditches on the same road.
“I pulled up three tires, a couple of car batteries, an old burn barrel and a little bit of light stuff,” said Munro. “Then I saw a couple of garbage bags over the bank. They looked like they were in fairly decent shape so I thought I’d go down and pull those up out of the ditch.”
Beneath the trash bags, Munro found what he initially thought was a discarded SCUBA tank. He reached down, picked it up, and quickly recognized it to be the dangerous end of a large projectile.
“I just about filled my pants,” he laughs.
Munro removed the projectile from the ditch and gently placed it on the road. Soon after he once again ran into Duffield.
“I said you ain’t going to believe what I found,” said Munro. “And she works for the DND (National Defence) in Vernon.
“So we walked down there and she took a photograph with her phone and texted to the powers that be at the DND in Vernon and the guy that’s responsible for getting rid of unexploded ordinances there took one look at it and said ‘that really looks like a tank round. And it looks live. Stay away from it.’”
Munro says they were instructed to contact the RCMP. They called 911 and after an hour’s wait, called the local detachment. Minutes later, officers were on the scene.
RCMP spokesperson Cpl. Dan Moskaluk said Sicamous RCMP officers responding to the report examined the shell and immediately contacted the Royal Canadian Armed Forces Navy Ordinance Disposal Unit at CFB Equimalt to attend and assess the item.
The item was later confirmed to be a 120mm practice projectile used by tanks.
Moskaluk says the projectile was removed and taken to a National Defence property in Vernon where it was safely disposed of.
The origins of the shell remain a mystery, says Moskaluk, and police are asking the public for any information on how the shell ended in the ditch.
“We understand that members of the public could possibly be in possession of collectible war memorabilia and be unsure of how to dispose of them; however, this was not the right way,” said Moskaluk.
Munro questions why the projectile’s previous owner didn’t just call the RCMP in the first place if they wanted it disposed of. Though he hasn’t been able to confirm whether or not the projectile was live, he worries what could have happened if it was.
“I’m thinking about, OK, maybe the department of highways decides they’re going to clean the ditches up – If that would have gone off that would have killed them,” said Munro. “And this thing was maybe 30 yards from the CP Rail line, where you have all sorts of dangerous cargo going by. You have six trains a day with a minimum of 50 carloads of oil, nevermind the propane, chlorine, you name it. You get something like that going off and puncturing a carload of chlorine, you’d have hundreds of people dead.”
Anyone with any information about the projectile may contact the Sicamous RCMP detachment at 250-836-2878.
