A construction crew working on the property of a Florida airport unearthed a 1,000-pound World World II-era bomb, triggering evacuations.
The explosive discovery was made Tuesday afternoon at the future site of the Wilton Simpson Technical College Campus at the Brooksville-Tampa Bay Regional Airport.
Deputies from the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office raced to the scene around 3 p.m., after receiving a 911 call from the construction workers reporting that they had dug up the ordnance, believed to be a “very old” Mark 65 bomb.
The high explosive aerial bomb was “so rusted and decayed” that there was no way of telling by just looking at it whether it was live or inert, Sheriff Al Nienhuis said in a video update shared on Facebook.
Deputies evacuated an area of about half a mile in every direction of the unearthed device as a precaution and closed a road to traffic.
The Citrus County Sheriff’s Office Bomb Team was called to assess the find and determined the bomb to be inert, or inactive.
Experts from MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa were sent to Brookville to dispose of the ordnance.
The Mark 65 is a general-purpose bomb that was developed by the US military in 1939.
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It was used during World War II against reinforced targets like dams and concrete or steel railroad bridges, according to the National Museum of the United States Air Force.
“The bomb itself was an unguided gravity bomb,” Dr. Angie Zambek, associate professor of history at UNC Wilmington, told the station Fox 13. “It was essentially just TNT in metal casing.”
The airport where the inactive ordnance was found was formerly the Brooksville Army Airfield where World War II bombers trained.
Zambek said with a high degree of certainty that the Mark 65 bomb had originated from Eglin Air Force Base near Panama City, Florida.