Sea Mine Blown Up

Sea Mine Sighted, Blown Up Off Washington Coast

It was probably a training mine, but that doesn't mean it couldn't explode.

By Kyle Mizokami
TWITTERRANJI SINHA

What appeared to be a sea mine was sighted yesterday in Washington State’s Puget Sound. The mine was taken under control by the U.S. Coast Guard, moved to a safe area, and blown up. The sudden appearance of the mine in a relatively high traffic waterway illustrates the danger that sea mines pose, decades after a war’s end.


The incident began yesterday afternoon when according to a local news report the mine was sighted 1,200 yards east of the Brownsville Marina, in Port Orchard strait. That’s about a mile north of the U.S. Navy’s Puget Sound Naval Shipyard facility at Bremerton, Washington, where nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines routinely dock for maintenance.

KOMO News reports that the Coast Guard and Navy responded to the sighting. Two divers secured a line to the mine and a small boat towed it to a safe location. The mine was successfully detonated but the Navy noted a lack of a secondary explosion, indicating the mine was probably an inert training mine.

The mine, which looks like something out of the famous Gilligan’s Island episode, resembles a U.S. Navy Mark 6 mine. The Navy Mark 6 was a moored antenna mine with a 300 pound TNT charge. Dropped over the side of a ship, it had a weighted bottom designed to anchor the mine to a fixed location. The actual mine is spherical with antenna detonators protruding from the surface of the mine. First introduced in 1917, the Mark 6 was so successful it remained in Navy inventories until 1985.

It’s unknown how the mine got into the strait, but it appears to have had broken loose from its mooring anchor. Port Orchard is near Bremerton but also a dead-end for large ships passing into the Pacific Ocean, so it’s possible the Navy conducted minelaying exercises decades ago and simply forgot to retrieve all of them when the exercise was over.

Mines were used extensive by U.S. forces during World War II and were, pound for pound, the most effective weapons used in the Asia-Pacific against Japan. The Japanese Empire, dependent on shipping to keep its war machine going, lost dozens of ships to a sea mine campaign waged by the U.S. Pacific submarine fleet.

Source: Komo News