Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis

1989: South Beach Bomb Disposal

In the late 1980s unexploded ordnance was discovered on South Beach in Edgartown. Turns out that some 45 years before, toward the end of World War II, the military had used South Beach and Cape Poge for bombing practice. Needless to say, they did not clean up after themselves. That work got under way several decades later.

Trustees of Reservations photo, from May 22, 2008, Vineyard Gazette

This “ordnance” — “bombs” in the vernacular — was small in size (see photo at right). Roughly 10% were estimated to be “live,” but you couldn’t tell at a glance which were and which weren’t, so removal was required.

This was a huge project. The Army Corps of Engineers was called in. Since it involved a public area used by residents of more than one Vineyard town, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission declared it a development of regional impact (DRI). Its report, from March 2, 1989, includes information on the work involved.

Other shirts exist with this theme, but this one’s the real deal, as testified by this logo near the hem on the back.

The work went forward, the T-shirt was born, and the ordnance was removed — but not overnight. Between 1989 and 1994, parts of South Beach were closed to the public for varying lengths of time while the operation proceeded. A Vineyard Gazette story from May 22, 2008, notes that “a 1,700-pound torpedo [was] recovered in July of 1994.”

However, that was not the end of the story. Nowhere close. As the date on that Gazette story suggests, unexploded ordnance was again a hot issue in 2008. A July 10, 2008, Gazette story warned that Vineyard residents close to the South Shore might shortly be hearing explosions as the U.S. Navy detonated more UXOs (UXO = “unexploded ordnance”), this time on Nomans, a small island off the Vineyard’s south coast.

That wasn’t the end of it either. A search of the Gazette archives on “munitions removal” turns up stories from 2015 and 2022.

It’s worth noting that this ordnance was all dropped on practice runs. It wasn’t meant to kill anyone or destroy buildings, and it didn’t. This is not true of the bombs dropped in wartime. The bombs dropped on Vietnam didn’t go away when the war ended. They continued to kill and maim. The work to remove them is dangerous and it continues to this day; see for instance this Al-Jazeera story from 2023. And the bombs are still falling on Gaza.