PORT TOWNSEND – It wasn’t a sewer pipe. It was an artillery shell.
“Over the past three years, I’ve been hitting it with the lawn mower and hitting it with the weed whacker,” said Jocelyn Maxwell of the object near a fence post in the back yard of the Rosecrans Street house he’s rented in Port Townsend for the past three years.
Maxwell, 24, learned on Saturday that what he had assumed was a sewer pipe sticking out of the ground was actually a World War I anti-aircraft artillery shell.
That’s what the State Patrol Interagency Bomb Squad told him before Port Townsend Police Department officers evacuated his family and several of their neighbors from their homes to allow the bomb squad to safely remove the old military ordnance.
The 20-inch-long ordnance was later found to contain no explosive material, said Trooper Brian George, State Patrol public information officer, on Tuesday.
