A Los Altos neighborhood began this week with a bang after a resident found a vintage grenade in his father's dresser on Monday morning.
The Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office Bomb Squad safely detonated a "potentially live" World War I-era grenade in the backyard of a home on the 1700 block of Christina Drive, the Los Altos Police Department said in a Monday afternoon press release.
Its discovery prompted the evacuation of four adjacent homes and other nearby residents to shelter in place, but police said "the detonation was completed without incident."
Rick Lindahn told the Los Altos Town Crier on Tuesday that he found the grenade while rearranging furniture in the bedroom belonging to his 96-year-old father, Alfred. The elder Lindahn had fallen out of bed Monday morning and was receiving treatment at a nearby hospital when his son opened the top drawer of the nightstand and found the grenade.
"There was some goo kind of oozing out of the top of it," he told the paper. "It would have made a really nice Christmas ornament for the tree with the little loop on the top you could hang on the tree."
The grenade was a gift to Alfred Lindahn from Rick Lindahn’s maternal Uncle Clarence, whom the younger Lindahn told the paper "collected an assortment of weaponry."
"It's been in his drawer, like three feet away from where his pillow's been, for 40 years," he said of the grenade.
Lindahn called Los Altos police at around 10:15 a.m. Officers called for backup from the sheriff’s office bomb squad, and the Santa Clara County Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services followed suit to address potential fire hazards stemming from the controlled detonation.
After the bomb squad set up the controlled detonation, Lindahn told the paper that he was handed "the little box, and I got to push the button and blow the whole thing up." The outlet reported that the ensuing explosion could be heard as far away as Mountain View's Morgan Street, near Highway 101.
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