If you were watching a movie about someone accidentally coming across a Second World War-era bomb on Remembrance Day, no less, you would probably roll your eyes and dismiss the plot as contrived and fake.
But straight from the truth is stranger than fiction file, that is precisely what happened in Estevan Thursday.
In a remarkable coincidence, a pair of local men uncovered a mortar shell while surveying a section of land south of the city near the City of Estevan's sewage treatment plant.
Although the shell turned out to be a harmless training round, the incident did lead to some excitement for the men who found the shell as well as the Estevan Police Service.
Jack Gauthier, a surveyor for Midwest Surveys, said he and a co-worker were performing a routine job when they came across the shell.
"I was working with my rodman and we were trying to find the property corners," said Gauthier. "The way we do that is use a metal detector and just sweep the area and if there is metal in the ground, we get a positive reading and we try and dig for the corners. (The mortar) was in the area of our survey and we thought that it was possibly a corner and we began to dig. My rodman (Roland Monteban) uncovered what looked like a rusty old mortar but we weren't really sure what it was. You never would think that it would be an explosive."
After checking Google and e-mailing photos of the device back to his office, Gauthier came to realize it was, in fact, a mortar that they had unearthed.
Not leaving anything to chance, they contacted the EPS who in turn brought in the Regina-based RCMP explosive ordinance disposal team who took the mortar to a safe location outside of the city and detonated it.
Const. Craig Bird of the EPS said it turned out the round was a training shell which contained no explosives.
He added that although this situation had a positive ending, he would like to remind the public that if they come across a similar item, they should not touch it and make sure to get in touch with police.
"This stuff has been sitting around for 60 years and it doesn't age well," said Bird. "If people have this stuff they need to contact us and not touch it. A lot of this can and may kill you. It could still be live and it could be dangerous."
For his part, Gauthier said the incident added a little excitement to what was a regular day on the job.
"It was kind of strange. It's something that doesn't happen every day and it was quite coincidental that it happened on Remembrance Day," he said. "Surveyors, we find all sorts, of things; we walk across a lot of places where people don't go very often but that is probably the strangest thing I've found."
