Before the city’s sanitation department starts building a new garbage transfer station on the edge of New York Harbor, it may have to clean up something more potentially explosive than rancid food that stayed too long on the shelf, a state lawmaker says.

Back on March 6, 1954, hundreds of tons of Korean War-vintage munitions were being loaded off the aircraft carrier USS Bennington when a sudden storm caused a barge to capsize and break loose, spilling its cargo. By the time the barge was found upside down six miles away, it was empty. About 400 anti-aircraft shells were recovered by divers at the loading site eight months later, but as many as 14,000 more were strewn along the bottom and never found, a state Assemblyman of Brooklyn, Bill Colton, said.

Mr. Colton said he was “deeply concerned” that dredging for the new shoreline waste facility could detonate live shells buried in the harbor silt, even after 54 years.

“It’s possible that 219 tons of anti-aircraft shells are still out there on the bottom, and we must make sure we’re not digging and dredging in a place where they go kapoof,” Mr. Colton said yesterday. “It’s an unknown hazard and could be a catastrophe.” He said the sanitation department should conduct an “intense environmental assessment” before going ahead with plans for the waste transfer station on Gravesend Bay, a broad inlet of the harbor.