This story first appeared in the Midcoast Update, a newsletter published every Tuesday and Friday morning. Sign up here to receive stories about the midcoast delivered to your inbox each week, along with our other newsletters.
Nowadays, Reid State Park is best known to many Mainers as one of the state’s finest sand beaches, where it can be impossible to find parking on a hot summer day.
But during World War II, visitors would not have been eager to enter the beach area that was soon to become a park. That’s because flight crews from Brunswick Naval Air Station practiced firing test rockets at a barge anchored just off Mile Beach, littering the area with warheads and rocket motors.
In the decades since, while the unexploded ordnance has mostly remained buried under the sand, it has occasionally surfaced following periods of extensive erosion.
Federal officials have advised that the unexploded ordnance poses no threat to the public, but they have periodically returned to the midcoast beach to search for it, including over the last year, in the wake of the twin storms that pounded the state’s coast in January 2024.
This time, rather than using traditional means of finding the debris such as metal detectors or expensive fixed-wing aircraft, they’ve been trying out a new technology that uses a magnetometer attached to a drone to search for it.
Federal, state and local officials have shared few details about the recent surveys, which are being conducted by the U.S. Department of Defense. They have either declined to speak publicly with the BDN, or not responded to requests for comment.
But in a press release that has since been removed from the federal agency’s website, officials said that the January 2024 storms uncovered underwater munition debris inside the state park and that researchers had surveyed about 30 acres of its sand dunes and shallow water to produce a map of “hot spots.”
The press release did not provide the date of the survey. It indicated that another survey was planned to “capture how hot spot locations may have shifted due to currents and dune transformation over time.”
After that, the agency said it plans to use more technologies to “zero-in on the hot spots and classify the materials, determining whether the areas in question are actual [unexploded ordnance] or simply debris and other clutter.”
Researchers said that using drones is cheaper and safer than traditional methods of searching for ordnance, allowing researchers to survey 10 acres per day across difficult terrain, compared to 1 acre with a metal detector.
There was also a short blurb on the recent surveys in the January newsletter of Maine’s Bureau of Parks and Lands.
“The Department of Defense has been conducting research at Reid State Park in conjunction with State Park Staff to determine where any military ordinance may be and gain a better understanding of how ordinance moves in the sand within such a large tidal zone,” wrote Haylee Parsons, manager of Reid State Park.
Federal agencies previously removed ordnance from Reid State Park in 1997 and in 2009, but in 2013, an official with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers told the BDN they might have to return to the site in the future.