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The proposed Shannon Park stadium site could have a hidden problem.

There’s a chance that some unexploded munitions exist at or near the proposed location for the $190-million, 24,000-seat stadium and in the nearby narrows off Bedford Basin at the northwestern end of Halifax Harbour.

John McCallum, a retired military ammunition technical officer and former commander of the Canadian Forces ammunition depot in Bedford, said he is not sounding emergency alarm bells but the possibility of munitions in the area remains.

“If somebody starts in to do a major construction job in Shannon Park, I have no doubt that they will have to do a major geophysical survey first to try to get some sense of whether or not there is metal debris in the ground, because there will be,” said McCallum, an instructor at the Royal Canadian Military College in Kingston, Ont., where he is working on an environmental science and engineering doctorate that focuses on underwater munitions.

“The problem with that (geophysical survey) is that it is hard to tell the difference between a piece of fragment that blew off a shell that blew up in 1945, and a fragment that is a small-arms round, or a nail or a piece of broken tin, or a piece of steel cable or a little chunk of a railway spike — because it is all metallic.”

McCallum said thousands of munitions rounds and metal fragments were sent airborne in the wake of the Bedford ammunition depot explosion of July 1945, “the other Halifax Explosion.”

The series of major and minor explosions emanated from the Rent Point magazine on the harbour side of what is now Burnside Park, and about two kilometres northwest of Shannon Park and the stadium site.

“A huge number of ammunition rounds fell into the ocean,” McCallum said. “The ones that fell on land for the most part got picked up.”

He said 1940s diving gear was pretty rudimentary.

“If you couldn’t get it from a boat with a hook or a pole, you didn’t get it. If you could reach it from hip-waders or chest-waders along the shore, it was probably picked up at the time. So yes, there is a lot of ammunition in there.”

More than 85 feet across and 65 feet deep, this water-filled crater is all that remains after an explosives storage hut bulging with munitions exploded during the blasts and fire at the Bedford naval arsenal on July 18-19, 1945. - File

McCallum said one of the magic aspects of ammunition is that as long as it is sleeping and you don’t disturb it any way, chances are it will continue to sleep for a long time.

“Ammunition accidents invariably happen not when the stuff is tucked away in a magazine in Bedford and nobody has lifted the pallet in three years, the accidents happen when you are in the process of moving pallets out and breaking them and cracking the crates off, repainting or loading.”

It is in handling munitions that something usually goes wrong.

“That’s the same way with the stuff that’s in the harbour. It is possible that there are items in there that would be a bad thing to handle but the likelihood of something going badly wrong is very, very, very remote.”

Even more remote, McCallum said, is the possibility of a 10-centimetre shell travelling two kilometres from the explosion site and landing intact at or near the stadium site.

“The chances of having a shell of that size fly that far and remain intact and then having you hit it, the probability is vanishingly small.”

The probability is miniscule, less likely than winning the lottery.

“The risk level is very low but not so low that you can ignore it completely. If you had a completely intact shell and by terrible misfortune you hit (it) with a steel pile, in theory you could generate enough energy with the confinement of the shell to generate an explosion.”

McCallum said any cleanup of munitions found on a site remains in perpetuity the responsibility of the Defence Department.

“There are no impacts on our lands from the 1945 Bedford magazine explosion,” said Chris Millier, director of real estate with Canada Lands, the federal Crown corporation tasked with redeveloping or selling surplus military properties.

Canada Lands acquired about 33 hectares of the Shannon Park site from DND in 2015, a property that for decades housed a small military community that included 421 apartment units, two schools, two churches, four storage facilities, a community centre and a large sports field.

Maritime Football Ltd. is negotiating with Canada Lands to purchase eight hectares of land to accommodate a Canadian Football League-sized stadium and an adjoining parking area.

Anthony LeBlanc, one of three principal Maritime Football partners, said he has not heard anything about munitions on the site.

“We’ve had a lot of conversations (with Canada Lands) and nothing has been brought up to me yet, and it should be if there are issues,” LeBlanc said.

“The conversations that we’re having is that if and when we were to purchase the land, it would be ready to be built on. They certainly haven’t said anything along those lines to us. But we are still in initial discussions.”

McCallum said land developers and DND have in the past made arrangements for a clearance contractor to come in and sweep the ground.

Any projectile that fell from the sky at the time of the explosion would not likely have covered the distance from Rent Point, and if it did, it would be less than a metre below the ground’s surface.

The contractor would sweep small swaths of land closest to Rent Point and move farther afield if they found anything, eventually reporting that the land is clear to a standard of certainty that satisfies both developer and insurer, he said.

“You would want that work done early in the process instead of turning up something with your excavators and your contractors on site,” McCallum said.

“That would mean delays for the developer and that costs money.

“It’s not a complex problem, it’s just a problem that you have to approach methodically and deal with it.”