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Radiation Crews Comb Area Hit by Bomb . For Geiger Count FLORENCE, 5. 0.APJ—An atomic bomb was accidentally dropped on Florence yesterday from a BAT—but, without the deadly warhead that could have lain waste this city of 30,000. It landed 100 yards ‘from the residence ‘of Waller Bill Gregg. The Gregg house was shattered. Six other houses and a church were damaged. Six persons were injured, none seriously, by the conges tional” TNT ‘explosive which” triggers the atantic bomb. The” blast shook an area two mited, when the Mars Bint com munity, five’ miles ‘east of, there. The Air Force officially des cribed the bomb as an Panarmed nutear device: it said the de vice was reledseg a 3 cause OF ““malfunction. ” plane's bomb lock-system.* Gregg, his, wife,’ jand. a mect were treated hospital’ for minor injuries. The miere, 9-year-ol Ela Davis, ‘was held at the’ hospital. for bute treatment “of, scalp .wobtid. The child~ was “thoroughly scrubbed by hospital attaches , as isi ‘whole living house: was gone. it was falling to pieces. The garage started “to fall apart too, out of there,’. An _ Air. Farce * sxesmany, ‘speaking unofficially, said“th ‘= bomb fragments, hurled as far as a quarter of a mile, probably would not be harmful to anyone handling them. He said the Air Farce is very anxious to collect as many pieces, of the device as possible. 3 ‘An unarmed atomic bomb, slick as the one dropped “here,” is one in which the complicated mech anisms required to set off a clear chain’ reaction, have not been connected and’ therefore ,fAnnot produce a nuclear explo sion. The Air Force said, how nger,, that the bomb which fell here contained all of the elements that would be used in an actual military attack except the com plete triggering device. SOUNDED LIKE ATOMIC BOMB FLORENCE, S.C. (AP) — “It sounded like one of those atomic bombs, said a witness. He was right too. It was an atomic bomb that fell near here yesterday. But the noise that L. E. Kirby heard was n't a nuclear explosion. Kirby couldn't have heard anything if it had been. Kirby lives in Mars Bluff, a tiny community five miles east of Florence, where an atom bomb v accidentally plummeted from a iBAT bomber. ‘The explosion which rocked the Thttle settlement was made by TNT. ‘This conventional explosion ‘is used to trigger the devastating nuclear blast. There was no out clear explosion. Children from a family liviiz only a mile from the blast center were playing unconcerned In their backyard while Air Force radia tion crews frantically combed the area with Geiger counters. Mrs. Katherine Mr. Beasley,a schoolteacher, got several calls from excited pupils. They wanted to know if school would be closed today, because of the errant A- bomb. Windows were shattered within a radius of 15 miles. Kirby said, “Black smoke billed Up, two geysers of it’? The smoke formed two dark clouds that as sumed the fearsome mushroom shape as they billowed upward.
Newspaper Details
Daily Journal
Fergus Falls, Minnesota, US
Wed, Mar 12, 1958
Page 7
Full Page
Clipped by
Jeff W.
