Major evacuation in Cologne after second world war bombs discovered
www.theguardian.com
About 20,000 people relocated while allied munitions dropped on German city in 1940s are made safe
  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
    4·
    28 days ago

    As someone living two cities over, I can tell you this is a real and big thing. While German specialists still disarm WW2 unexploded ordinance about three to four times a day, and there is no week where there is not at least a minor evacuation because of this somewhere, this one is big. Since 08:00 local the roads are closed, nobody gets (back) in, police, firemen, etc are going from door to door to alert people living under rocks.

    This is more or less in the city center of the biggest city in the state; if not a large part of the area (1km radius) was the river Rhine, it would be way more than the 20k people that need to move out. On top of that, there are 58 hotels, a hospital, senior citizens homes, loads of companies and factories, schools, kindergardens. And everyone must go.

    Three bridges crossing the river are in the evacuation area, most importantly the Hohenzollern bridge, which not only connects the two big central train stations (Cologne has one on both sides of the Rhine), it is one of the most frequented east-west connections for trains in this part of Germany. The western station, which is the official Central Station of Cologne, will still be accessible, as it is just outside the evacuation area, but it will only have access to the track network from one side. The other station Köln/Deutz is closed, and with it the north/south train links along the river Rhine

    The famous Cologne Cathedral is just outside the evacuation area. But a lot of historic buildings, museums, theaters, the Philhamony are inside the zone.

    Nobody can say when this will be over, as they can only start to disarm the bombs as soon as everyone has left the evacuation zone, and there are always some people who refuse to leave and have to be forced out, which takes a lot of time and efforts. I would not be surprised if they could start the actual disarmamant process sometime this night.

    And the bombs themselves have been extraordinary, too: Two unexploded bombs with tricky fuses and a metric ton of explosives each right next to each other, with a smaller (500kg) one not far off.

  • ComfortableRaspberry@feddit.org
    2·
    28 days ago

    I’m amazed that this is still happening and it’s not even very rare. They found one just a few months ago on a construction site in my hometown.

    • int_not_found@feddit.org
      2·
      27 days ago

      Bombs in WWII were both inaccurate and relatively unreliable. Something around 10% of bombs dropped didn’t explode and of those that did explode only ~5-10% did so on target.

      The answer was to just drop more bombs, increasing the amount of duds even more. Roughly 2.5 million tonnes of tnt equivalent were dropped over Germany alone, mostly in 50kg to 500kg packages.

      Additionally factors like muddy grounds both increases the chance of malfunctioning trigger mechanism and the bomb simply burrowing into the ground, hiding from visual detection.

      I leave you with the math on how many duds are potentially buried.

      To me it is a form of memorial on why war, especially large scale war, just sucks. Society still has to pay the price of the actions of people that are mostly dead by now. And I’m scared that more and more people in the world want to revive the ideology behind those actions.