Bass River Beach Bonfire Leaves Rusty Nails Behind – Fun Police Forecast Tetanus Epidemic

CapeCodOnline.com – Last fall’s bonfire on Bass River Beach — a brand-new addition to the town’s popular Seaside Festival on Columbus Day weekend — left behind something more than the hoped-for pleasant memories.

“We saw the ash ring from the bonfire, and in it were hundreds of 4- to 6-inch rusty nails,” said Andrea Sandler, a Connecticut resident who owns a seasonal home in West Yarmouth. “We called the Police Department about it.”

Several departments and volunteers involved in planning the bonfire had decided pallets would be the cleanest wood to burn — with no chemicals or old paint to pollute the pristine stretch of coastline. Nobody thought of all the nails that held those pallets together.

“We had the DPW, fire, police and health director at the planning meeting,” said Patricia Armstrong, director of the town’s Parks and Recreation Department. “We thought we had really done our due diligence on this.”

“I can’t believe with all the people that discussed it, we didn’t think of the nails,” Armstrong said.

Love the straight honesty from Patricia Armstrong here. She just says hey, we didn’t think about the nails, we should have but didn’t. Our bad. It’s refreshing to hear that kind of candor from a town official for a change.

Of course the Fun Police are probably already assembling to discuss how they can use this to stop the bonfire next year. They are probably picking a patsy to inject with tetanus as we speak so they can parade him around town meeting twitching like a crackhead.

The sad part is that they will probably win and there most likely won’t be a bonfire next year. But what’s even sadder than that is this lady who found the nails and called the cops. Wouldn’t the DPW be a better call to make in that situation? What are the police going to do about rusty nails on a beach? I’d love to hear the conversation the responding officers had with each other after that call. Yeah sure lady, let us just take off all of our bullet proof armor, radios and gun belts so we can roll up our pants and get to work removing those nails with our specialized police nail removal tools.

There’s two distinct types of people in this world. There’s the ones that see rusty nails on the beach and call the cops and then there’s the ones that actually understand how the world works.