26 October 2017

WW2 ain't over

Tom McKay has a Gizmodo article about a bomb, still around:

Large sections of central Frankfurt, Germany were evacuated on Sunday in preparation for authorities to defuse a World War Two-era, 1.4-ton HC 4000 air mine, with CNN reporting at least sixty thousand people being asked to leave the area while the bomb defusing operation proceeded.
Take a big sigh of relief and wipe that bead of sweat off your brow: the bomb was successfully defused, but still needs to be removed from the area with utmost caution, according to Deutsche Welle.
The air mine, one of the largest varieties of ordnance used during the War, is of a type sometimes referred to as a blockbuster, due to its ability to destroy entire rows of buildings. It was presumably dropped during the 1939-1945 air war the Allies waged on Germany, and was only discovered during recent construction work after sitting underground for at least seventy years.
“This bomb has more than one ton of explosives,” Frankfurt fire department chief Reinhard Ries said, according to ABC News. “It’s not just fragments that are the problem, but also the pressure that it creates that would dismantle all the buildings in a hundred-meter radius.”
According to the BBC, the evacuation zone contained “twenty retirement homes, an opera house, and Germany’s central bank where half the country’s gold reserves are stored.”
“We want to avoid not being able to return to these buildings on Monday morning,” Ries added. “That would create a very difficult situation for Frankfurt.”
Experts estimate thousands of tons of explosives from World War Two-era saturation bombing still remain scattered around Germany, holdouts from the estimated three million tons of bombs that Allied air forces dropped to eviscerate German military and industrial capacity. According to the Smithsonian, authorities discover approximately two thousand tons of explosives a year, and from 2000 to 2016, eleven bomb technicians were killed in failed defusing attempts.
Just the day before, authorities evacuated twenty thousand people in preparation to defuse a US-made bomb in the city of Koblenz.
One town, Oranienburg, hosted Nazi chemical facilities, aircraft manufacturing plants, railway junctions and an SS arms depot, according to Deutsche Welle, leading the Allies to drop more than ten thousand bombs on the area. Technical University of Cottbus bomb expert Wolfgang Spyra told the news agency he estimated seven to fifteen percent of the bombs were duds, meaning hundreds still lie under the town.
Explosives used in World War Two-era Allied ordnance were generally stable enough to remain dangerous for long amounts of time, though other components of the bombs often degrade, making them particularly hazardous to try and defuse.
“The scale of this bomb is overwhelming,” Ries said, according to CNN. “I have never seen anything like it.”
Rico says some parts of war last a long time...

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