Staff at a Peterhead business have described the “whirlwind” moment they were evacuated after a bomb scare last Friday.
Customers and staff at John Williamson Scrap Metal, were forced to leave the premises after the shock discovery of a WWII-era bomb.
It caused large areas of the town’s Dales Industrial Estate to be cordoned off with the deployment of the police’s EOD bomb squad.
But, with officers unable to confirm if the ordnance was live or not – operations manager, Jed McGowan, 36, described it as a “less than ideal Friday night,” with the estate being locked down until after 9pm.
Suspicions were first raised when parts from a wartime German U-boat were brought in for scrapping by a local customer around 3pm.
Said to be recovered from the North Sea by her late father, who is a deep-sea diver, Jed and his crew were shocked to find the remains of an 18-inch ‘bomb’ amongst the scrap.
Staff describe ‘whirlwind day’
Jed, who was on shift at the time, called the police immediately, wishing to go down “all the proper channels.”
The customer claimed the 18-inch bomb was previously kept on her father’s mantelpiece before being brought in.
Jed, speaking to the Press and Journal, said: “The police were quite calm, so we weren’t scared too much by it.
“There was one staff member who was quite concerned.
“I think the two others were just happy to get an early finish on a Friday!
“We were back to work on the Saturday morning.
“We definitely had something to newsworthy to talk about after that.
“It’s one of those that’s still intact, so no one has disarmed it so you don’t know if it could go off.
“It was a bit of a whirlwind to be honest – everyone was talking about it in the town that night.”
All proper protocols followed
Jed also added that the company wanted to follow all the proper protocols while dealing with the threat.
“We wanted to go down the proper channels.
“The police said they didn’t know if it was live or not,” he continued.
“They said it might have had a 100m blast radius!
“I couldn’t put it back in the customer’s car – who had a two-month-old child in the back.
“We had to put it back in one of our steel containers until the authorities came.
“They took three hours to come up the road, but they didn’t look too concerned.
“It didn’t look as if it was going to go off at any point.
“They closed a lot of the road just due to the estimated blast radius, which they said was 100 metres.”
Police eventually, after testing, found out the ‘bomb’ was only an empty shell, and was eventually disposed of.
A police spokesperson said: “Around 3.30pm on Friday, 23 August, 2024, we were called to a report of unexploded ordnance at Dales Industrial Estate, Peterhead.
“The item was assessed by EOD and was found to be an empty shell.”
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