BANGOR DAILY NEWS • January 28, 2025
Nowadays, Reid State Park is best known to many Mainers as one of the state’s finest sand beaches. 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. 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. Officials said that the 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.”