Show and tell (and run like hell.)

[Gob]

A session of "show and tell" has forced the evacuation of a school in Newcastle after a student brought a hand grenade into the classroom.

Police said the grenade resembles a World War II "pineapple" and is believed to be inactive, but it will stay on a teacher's desk at Hunter Christian School, Mayfield, until specialists deem it safe.

Students and staff were evacuated to a park near the school, on Kerr Street, on Wednesday morning after the student brought the grenade in to show his classmates, police said.

Newcastle police media spokesman, Senior Constable Tony Tamplin, said it was not yet known where the student got the grenade from.

"It looks fairly old and inactive. Most of what we're doing now is acting in the interests of safety," Senior Constable Tamplin said.

Inspector Gerrard Lawson, from Newcastle City Local Area Command, said all students were safe and well.

"At this time we anticipate an early resolution to this issue but we will await specialist advice as to the safety of moving the item," Inspector Lawson said in a statement.

"I want to warn members of the public that if they have or are aware of military ordnance they should not touch or move it but contact police immediately."

Specialist police and Australian Defence Force personnel will examine the grenade.

Concerned parents can collect their children from the Phoenix Club on Industrial Drive, but students can stay at the sports club until the end of the school day.

Hunter Christian School has students from Kindergarten to Year 12, according to its website.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Police said the grenade resembles a World War II "pineapple" and is believed to be inactive, but it will stay on a teacher's desk at Hunter Christian School, Mayfield, until specialists deem it safe.

[oldr_n_wsr]

but it will stay on a teacher's desk

Of all the places to store a grenade, that's one place I would pick (if I were still in school).

[Miles]

"fairly old and inactive". I wonder how they come to that conclusion. I seriously doubt if anyone would have a live gernade from any war, however, that being said morons do abound everywhere. The most likely explanation is it is someones paperweight which would make it also quite a conversation peice. Hell it is already a conversation peice.

[Guinevere]

"fairly old and inactive". I wonder how they come to that conclusion. I seriously doubt if anyone would have a live gernade from any war, however, that being said morons do abound everywhere. The most likely explanation is it is someones paperweight which would make it also quite a conversation peice. Hell it is already a conversation peice.

You'd be surprised where those kinds of items turn up, and how little people know about them, or what to do with them. One of my first litigation cases as a newly fledged lawyer concerned a high end neighborhood in NW Washington DC, where buried ordinance -- including chemical agents like mustard gas -- was turned up on a construction site. After some research, we discovered the area had been a temporary training area during WWI, and DOD had to come in and go over the entire neighborhood looking for more buried weapons. They found individual ones, and whole caches of the stuff. DOD just abandoned the area after the war ended, and never told anyone, or warned anyone that munintions were buried in the ground (although when the training area was active, it had been fenced off and warnings had been posted). Over a thousand pieces have been found, there is arsenic leaching out of them into the soil and water, and I believe that over the summer one of those very expensive homes (built by my former client) had to be demolished because the house itself had become toxic.

[Miles]

We had a simular situation here in our small town. It was not munitions related but rather the site of an old glass plant that had posioned the ground.

[oldr_n_wsr]

Here on LI we have Grumman and some other sites (BNL comes to mind but I don't really remember).

[Guinevere]

We had a simular situation here in our small town. It was not munitions related but rather the site of an old glass plant that had posioned the ground.

Miles, there are thousands of those kinds of sites, all across the county. There are almost 3000 sites which are or were listed on the National Priorities List as the most highly toxic sites in the country. These now include federally-owned military facilities, which originally were exempt from the federal cleanup laws.

The states have separately listed sites under their own hazardous waste clean-up laws as well - in Massachusetts we have an uncountable number of sites where there have been clean-ups, or where clean ups are proceeding (although this inventory contains every site -- whether the cleanup was a small heating oil release, or a much larger site with ongoing contamination issues).

[oldr_n_wsr]

Love Canal is one of the first toxic sites I remember hearing about.