Skip hire firm director, Craig Williams, got a surprise lunchtime date with a hand grenade, which fell out of one of their skips whilst it was being emptied.
Paul Grantham, also a director at M and M Skip Hire on Baker Street, Attercliffe, Sheffield, said:
“Craig Williams spotted the grenade and recognised what it was immediately so he rang the police.”
“He picked it up and put it into an empty skip so that if it did blow up it might contain the blast.”
“At this stage we don’t know where it came from but we will be able to go through our records and work out where we picked the skip up from.”
Once on the scene, police officers called in the bomb squad, fearing that the grenade could be live.
An hundred metre safety cordon was established, which meant that the skip yard and all neighbouring businesses had to be evacuated. The Door Warehouse, Patterson Brothers Engineering, Young’s Butchers and Burnt Tree Car and Van Rental were among the other firms affected.
The grenade was eventually blown up in a controlled explosion and the investigation is continuing to discover where the extended-lunch-break-creating device came from.