Florida Construction News staff writer
Construction workers discovered an inert, 1,000-pound military bomb near Brooksville-Tampa Bay Regional Airport on Tuesday afternoon, according to the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office.
An area of about a half a mile radius around the airport was evacuated and the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office Bomb Team competed an assessment and determined the bomb, described as an M=65 ordinance, to be inert. A team from MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa was called to the scene to help dispose of the ordnance.
The bomb was found shortly before 3 p.m. by construction workers at the northeast corner of the airport near Helicopter Drive, where Wilton Simpson Technical College is being built, Hernando County Sheriff Al Nienhuis said in a video posted on Facebook.
“They found what was believed to be a World War II era, 1,000-pound bomb,” Nienhuis said in the video. “It’s likely inert, but because it is so rusted and decayed there’s certainly no way of telling whether its live ammunition or inert.”
