Desert’s Deadly Secrets

Gen. George Patton and his troops left California’s desert half a century ago.

But their leftovers still haunt Frank Anderson.

At least once a month, Anderson gets a frantic page after someone sees a rusted land mine or long-forgotten bomb buried in the middle of nowhere.

Lately, the calls have come more frequently, he says. Heavy winter rains and wind have washed away sand, exposing the desert’s deadly secrets from Niland to Needles to Barstow.

“The desert’s dangers aren’t just rattlesnakes and thorns,” said Anderson, an explosives expert for Riverside County. “There’s bombs.”

Exactly how many World War II explosives remain on what are now public lands is unknown. Federal officials issue pamphlets to hikers and others who venture onto wild lands urging them to watch for unexploded ordnance. That’s the military’s term for bombs, mines, grenades and other such weapons.

“People find stuff and think, ‘Well, if it’s out here and it hasn’t blown up, it must be OK.’ But boy are they wrong,” said Sgt. Bob Hall, head of the San Bernardino County bomb squad, which gets as many as two calls a week.

“People really need to hear the message: ‘Do Not Touch.’ If they’re in the desert and come across one of these things, they should back off and report it immediately.”

On a recent afternoon, a middle-aged couple was out collecting rocks when they saw a glint of metal in a quiet desert stretch just north of Blythe.

Within two hours, Anderson and other technicians from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Hazardous Device Team, along with Boomer, a bomb-sniffing Labrador, descended on the area.

Anderson identified a 12-inch round device as a practice mine. He says the mine was not big enough to blow up a tank, but could have maimed or killed a person by spewing fragments. The stabilizing chemicals deteriorate over time, making such weapons more dangerous, he said.

Anderson placed a small amount of dynamite atop the mine and blew it up from a quarter-mile away. The explosion echoed for two miles, leaving a small crater where the mine had lurked for 50 years.

In 1996, 150 mines, bombs or other military explosives were found scattered across California’s public lands near Indio, Rice, the Salton Sea and elsewhere, according to the FBI bomb data center.

Federal officials and authorities in San Bernardino and Riverside counties say they can recall no deaths from discovered World War II munitions.

For the past 15 years, the U.S. Department of Defense has intermittently funded a program to locate and evaluate discarded weapons and will spend $15 million this year trying to target desert areas in California and part of Arizona. The effort is part of a $125-million annual budget to clean up unexploded devices nationwide.

“No one knows what’s where,” said Vince Del Greco, manager of the Formerly Used Defense Sites program, part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “During World War II, they were concerned with secrecy. Never in their wildest imaginations did they think people would go to these places where now we have cities and recreational activities.”

In 1942, when Patton flew over the deserts of California, Arizona and Nevada looking for a training site, he saw dry salt beds, flat valleys, steep gorges--and no humanity except for a handful of gas stations.

The United States had entered the war three months earlier when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. In North Africa, British troops were on the brink of defeat. Patton’s orders were to train American troops in desert warfare.

He established a Desert Training Center that spanned 16,200 square miles in three states, but the bulk of the activity was in eastern California, from the Mexican border north through the Mojave Desert. Patton’s headquarters was based at what is now called Chiriaco Summit, an outpost 27 miles from Indio that houses the General Patton Memorial Museum.

More than 1 million soldiers passed through the training center, the largest in world history, before it closed in May 1944. Those soldiers planted land mines and fired mortars, and when they left, some explosives remained buried in the isolated terrain the troops called “the land that God forgot.”

“People are always asking me, ‘Is the government negligent for leaving these things?’ ” Anderson said. “I say you have to consider the times. They were training as fast as they could and didn’t keep precise records. Now it’s half a century later and a lot of territory.”

Many explosives have turned up on the vast tracts maintained by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. John Blachley, chief ranger with the bureau’s Palm Springs office, says that his staff has been alarmed to find people using exposed mines in the desert for target practice.

“They like to make them explode,” Blachley said. “And you know when they shot at it they had no way of knowing whether it was a practice mine or one of the real mines that are out here. We’ve just been lucky. So far.”

Other people have carted home unexploded weapons as souvenirs.

“We keep finding everything from hand grenades to large bombs in people’s houses and garages,” Hall said. “Sometimes they’ve had them for years.”

Earlier this year in Beaumont, a woman sorting through her father’s belongings found 10 mortar rounds. All the ammunition was live.

“That family was there all those years, eating dinner, getting together for holidays,” Anderson said. “And then she finds what looks like 10 little bombs in the closet.”

Just how unpredictable and shattering explosives can be was brought home forcefully in May 1997 in Fontana. The owner of an auto wrecking firm had bought scrap metal from a practice range at Ft. Irwin, northeast of Barstow. The scrap tank mines had been cleared as inert.

But as an employee at the auto firm tried to cut the aluminum with a blowtorch, the mine exploded, killing one man and injuring two others. The Army Corps of Engineers spent three weeks cleaning up the debris. The safety officer for a subcontractor, who had been hired to check the scrap, was charged with second-degree murder and faces a trial next month in San Bernardino County.

The only other death in the past decade that officials can recall was that of a scrap metal collector who was killed while dismantling a bomb. The device, however, had been stolen from the Chocolate Mountain Gunnery Range near the Salton Sea and was not a buried weapon.

Although bombs are dropped almost daily on that range, warning signs do not deter determined “scrappers” who carry off bombs for scrap metal not knowing whether they may have picked up unexploded ammunition. “We’ll stop cars with a possible live bomb in the back seat,” Hall said.

Although the bombs used in current training are confined to well-marked areas, the whereabouts of World War II relics often remain a mystery.

“In most cases, these things were there for decades and there wasn’t a danger until someone went there,” said Del Greco of the Army Corps of Engineers clean-up project.

“But now as a larger number of people discover these devices, there’s the potential. The question becomes: ‘How long are we as a society willing to wait?’ This won’t make headlines until after there’s a disaster.”