Things that go Boom!

This has been an exciting two days here at the Museum! What do you do when your director tells you “We have a bomb”? What?! Sure enough, he wants to acquire it for our collections so he picked it up from the person who found it. Not only is it a bomb, but it still has liquid in it! They drove it from where they found it to their house and then they drove it to the Museum. They had this bomb in the back of their cars without knowing if it was live or what was in it. Oy. Well, the cool part is that it was found near Carlsbad, NM and is from World War II when planes were testing in the area. We don’t know quite yet if it was a practice bomb or a real one but in any case usually any bomb dropped from a plane like this was usually destroyed into little pieces. Well, this one is actually whole and in pretty good shape other than it’s a little rusted. I know this because after he told me about it I had to go see it for myself. I’m curious like that. It’s pretty cool but I have to handle this thing, really?! Thankfully I don’t have to handle it just yet. Our director called the NM State Police in to look at it first. They got here today (June 11, 2010) and our director was teaching the Jr. Archaeology Camp so I got to be the first point of contact. I took them out to where it was located (too close to the Museum if you ask me) and they suggested that I go back inside and wait for them to come and tell me what’s going on. They were going to x-ray it and didn’t want me there in case something happened. Our director showed up at this point so I was no long the point of contact. Fine with me! Well, come to find out later that they are calling in the near-by air force base to come in and look at it and we have to evacuate the Museum, because they want to try to figure out what might be in the bomb. Holy cow, really?! Yep. After thinking how scary that is, my second thought was about all the artifacts in the Museum. Well the people will be safe which is the first objective, but what about the artifacts? Nothing. Even if I wanted to do something I couldn’t because when they say evacuate, they mean evacuate…NOW! We were told to leave things as they were and leave. Can do! Eek!! So that’s where we are. We closed the Museum for the afternoon and as I am writing this I am lounging comfortably in my hammock on my patio. It would be really neat to have this artifact in the collection since there were WWII air force bases in the areas so I hope they can disarm it and get the liquid out safely, but really, can we not do this again?