Tony Lovell, a British dog walker, thought he’d discovered what was just a “nice looking bottle” on the beach.
Instead of finding a message inside, he found near-tragedy for him and his family — potentially from one of the greatest tragedies of the last century.
According to a BBC report last week, Lovell was walking along the beach at Hartlepool, on the coast of the North Sea in Britain, when he found a bottle that looked to be interesting.
“I always like searching the beach for interesting things — bits of old boats, funny stones, pieces of Victorian boots, weird vapes,” he told the U.K. Daily Mail.
A glass bottle qualified as interesting enough, and he took it home to clean it. While he initially thought it to be a liquor bottle, he later noticed a liquid that definitely didn’t seem to be booze inside of it.
“I thought it was some posh modern gin bottle. But the liquid inside was bright orange and smelled awful,” he said.
Lovell’s son told him it was too “dangerous” to keep. This would later prove to be very accurate.
Although accounts vary as to what happened next — the BBC reported he took the top off, the Daily Mail said it had just been in his hands when it started smoking — what happened next isn’t in dispute.
The material inside the bottle was dangerous — and the flames from it apparently began singeing the dog leash that was around his neck.
Lovell, the Daily Mail said, “rushed to hospital and left the bottle next to a bin, where the army’s bomb disposal unit collected it before later destroying the item in a controlled explosion.”
“The dog walker was attended to by the North East Ambulance Service and was found to be uninjured.”
“They asked what I’d done with the lid, and I said I’d just thrown it on the grass somewhere,” he said after first responders came to the scene.
“Then suddenly there was a patch of grass going up in flames, that was the lid.”
The bomb disposal unit eventually neutralized the explosive in a controlled manner.
This was, apparently, a World War II relic — more specifically, a phosphorous-based grenade.
Lovell’s discovery comes just weeks after roughly 150 similar grenades were found in the same area of shoreline in northeastern England.
However, as of the Daily Mail’s May 10 report, nobody had properly identified the bottle that Lovell found as a phosphorous grenade from that conflict. If it wasn’t, however, experts believe that it was made out of a similar type of flammable or explosive material that would ignite when exposed to oxygen.
Whatever the case, Lovell says to be careful, even though he’s fine.
“It’s quite scary that something from a conflict long ago is still having after effects,” he said.
“People need to be careful, it might just look like a bottle, but it could be something much more dangerous.”
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