Unexploded ordnance from World War II frequently turns up in German communities, and sometimes authorities are forced to evacuate small areas to dispose of the dangerous explosives. But a large bomb that recently surfaced in the Rhine River has sparked security measures of historic proportions in the central German city of Koblenz.
Three meters (10 feet) long and weighing 1.8 tons, the aerial bomb was recently spotted after a particularly dry November lowered water levels along the busy river. Now preparations are underway for a massive evacuation set for Sunday.
Some 45,000 residents -- nearly half of the city's total population of 106,000 -- will be forced to leave the area. That includes two hospitals, seven retirement homes and the jail. To aid in the operation, the city has organized some 900 people and 350 vehicles to ferry residents to safety.
More Discoveries Expected
Authorities are building a temporary dam of some 350 sandbags around the bomb, currently covered by about 40 centimeters (16 inches) of water. A crane commissioned to build the dam was put in place on Tuesday, fire department spokesman Manfred Morschhäuser told the German news agency DAPD. The area will then be pumped free of water so the bomb can be defused.
In the meantime, the fire department has established a telephone hotline. "Several hundred callers are getting in touch each day with their questions and problems," Morschhäuser said.
Each household included in the evacuation will be notified via flier, he said. "And on Sunday we'll go ringing from house to house," he added. Emergency workers need a 1.8-kilometer (1.1-mile) radius buffer zone to ensure safety.
Further bomb discoveries along the riverbed are expected to continue due to the low water levels, authorities said.
EasternOrthodox
Posted on: 12/10/2011 19:22
A photo of the bomb (I am using a separate comment because posting photos sometimes causes you to lose what you have typed):
Two anti-tank mines from World War II have exploded spontaneously in the ground next to a road in the eastern German state of Brandenburg. Fortunately, nobody has been hurt so far. Experts are warning that the risk of such sudden blasts is growing because the trigger mechanisms are decaying with age.
Two anti-tank mines from World War II exploded spontaneously along a road in the eastern German state of Brandenburg in the past week, confirming warnings that unexploded bombs are becoming increasingly unstable.
Last Wednesday, Dec. 14, a detonation tore a crater 10 meters (33 feet) wide next to a road between the towns of Gross Ossnig and Neuhausen, some 100 kilometers (62 miles) southeast of Berlin, Brandenburg police said. No one was hurt. One eyewitness, Gerhard Willing, said a schoolbus had just driven past the spot. "It was damned lucky that no one was hurt," he told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. The area had been a storage site for a nearby bridge construction project. "Metal struts weighing tons were dumped there, big trucks drove past and workers were constantly walking around," said Willing.
A stretch of the road subsided and the police cordoned off the area. Bomb disposal experts found two more mines nearby. They were too unstable to remove and had to be blown up where they lay on Friday. Some 400 residents living within one kilometer of the area were evacuated and told to leave their doors and windows open to prevent the glass shattering from the shockwaves.
Then, on Saturday, another mine exploded of its own accord. "Self-detonations are very rare," Torsten Schwieg, a local council official, said. "But having two go off at such a short interval is highly unusual."
The area was the scene of fighting in World War II because it was close to an airfield where newly-built Focke-Wulf combat aircraft tested their machine guns. The airfield was bombed several times.
Elderly locals recalled that weapons and munitions were thrown in a bomb crater near the airfield, one local newspaper reported. That might explain why the mines were found buried three or four meters deep -- they were evidently discarded. If they had been planted to take out a tank, they would have been placed much closer to the surface.
Unexploded shells and munitions are a common problem in Germany. Earlier this month, the country had to conduct one of its largest ever peacetime evacuations in Koblenz when some 45,000 people, half the population of the western city, had to leave their homes while experts screwed the detonators out of a British 1.8 ton bomb found in the Rhine River.
"Germany will have to deal with the munitions problem for a very long time to come," Hans-Jürgen Weise, the former bomb disposal chief for the west of Brandenburg, now retired, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "Unexploded bombs are becoming more dangerous by the day through material fatigue as a result of ageing and through the erosion of safety elements in the trigger mechanisms."
In a previous interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, in 2008, Weise recalled his team getting two or three calls a day with bombs being unearthed at construction sites or elsewhere. He said the state was particularly contaminated by American delayed-action bombs which were becoming so unstable that it would soon become impossible to defuse them safely.
The search for further mines in Neuhausen is continuing this week.
RitaTG
Posted on: 12/21/2011 17:22
I have seen another ghost of war.......
It was on my nephew's face.......
Since he came back from Afghanistan he has not been the same.
An angry hurt young man has taken his place.....
Ghosts abound........
Rita
RitaTG
Posted on: 12/21/2011 17:28
I have seen another ghost of war.......
It was on my nephew's face.......
Since he came back from Afghanistan he has not been the same.
An angry hurt young man has taken his place.....
Ghosts abound........
Rita
EasternOrthodox
Posted on: 12/22/2011 16:36
I am sorry to hear that. Did he have bad experiences?
RitaTG
Posted on: 12/22/2011 16:45
Yes EO ... his experiences were very bad......
He is now a time bomb ticking away.....
War leaves many ghosts and buried bombs.....
Thank you for this thread
Rita
MikePaterson
Posted on: 12/22/2011 19:00
This is a letter, written on Boxing Day, 1916, by my grandfather to his six-year-old daughter (my mother).
He was killed at Passchendaele, nine and a half months later.
PEACE ON EARTH!!!!
Arminius
Posted on: 12/22/2011 20:31
Hi EO:
This bomb was a "blockbuster," so named because it was capable of levelling an entire city block. Thousands of them were dropped on German cities, a few remained unexploded.
MistsOfSpring
Posted on: 12/22/2011 19:24
MikePaterson wrote:
He was killed at Passchendaele, nine and a half months later.
Thank you for sharing the letter. It's far too easy to think of things that happened so long ago in an abstract, disconnected kind of way. Letters like this make it easier to connect to the people involved, instead of just a bunch of dates and statistics and maps. It's so sad that he never got to see his little girl again.
MikePaterson
Posted on: 12/22/2011 19:42
And he was one of more than a miliion young men killed between the Ypres Salient and the ruined village of Passchendaele a short distance away.
War is deeply eveil, deeply insane, wholly ugly and wholly destructive.
Arminius
Posted on: 12/22/2011 20:34
MikePaterson wrote:
War is deeply evil, deeply insane, wholly ugly and wholly destructive.
Yes, war is all that—and entirely avoidable!
So let us do our best to avoid war, and the circumstances that lead to war.
MikePaterson
Posted on: 12/22/2011 22:15
It's not enough to try to avoid war: we have to MAKE peace and to make peace, we have to start with good will to ALL. Making peace is as active, challenging and materially costly as making war — it's not merely the silence of weapons. It has to be the celebration of justice.
EasternOrthodox
Posted on: 12/22/2011 23:48
Thanks for posting the letter, Mike. It is a very sad reminder of the past. And how we need to try and make sure nothing like WW I or WW II happen again.
Yes, Arminius, I am surprised to hear there is still so much unexploded ordinance in Germany. Yes, I know the WW II bombing was very severe and destroyed a large part of the country.
I was going to post a picture of the crater left when that mine exploded, but I could not do it from work, something about my browser settings.
EasternOrthodox
Posted on: 12/22/2011 23:44
RitaTG wrote:
Yes EO ... his experiences were very bad......
He is now a time bomb ticking away.....
War leaves many ghosts and buried bombs.....
Thank you for this thread
Rita
Is any help available, given that he is a veteran? Or he is unwilling to seek help, perhaps.
Comments
EasternOrthodox
Posted on: 12/10/2011 19:53
Der Spiegel writes about how an unexploded bomb from WW II was discovered when water levels fell to historic lows in the Rhine River recently.
Photos are here:
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-75865.html
Partial evacuation of nearby city of Koblenz described here:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,800947,00.html
Unexploded ordnance from World War II frequently turns up in German communities, and sometimes authorities are forced to evacuate small areas to dispose of the dangerous explosives. But a large bomb that recently surfaced in the Rhine River has sparked security measures of historic proportions in the central German city of Koblenz.
Three meters (10 feet) long and weighing 1.8 tons, the aerial bomb was recently spotted after a particularly dry November lowered water levels along the busy river. Now preparations are underway for a massive evacuation set for Sunday.
Some 45,000 residents -- nearly half of the city's total population of 106,000 -- will be forced to leave the area. That includes two hospitals, seven retirement homes and the jail. To aid in the operation, the city has organized some 900 people and 350 vehicles to ferry residents to safety.
More Discoveries Expected
Authorities are building a temporary dam of some 350 sandbags around the bomb, currently covered by about 40 centimeters (16 inches) of water. A crane commissioned to build the dam was put in place on Tuesday, fire department spokesman Manfred Morschhäuser told the German news agency DAPD. The area will then be pumped free of water so the bomb can be defused.
In the meantime, the fire department has established a telephone hotline. "Several hundred callers are getting in touch each day with their questions and problems," Morschhäuser said.
Each household included in the evacuation will be notified via flier, he said. "And on Sunday we'll go ringing from house to house," he added. Emergency workers need a 1.8-kilometer (1.1-mile) radius buffer zone to ensure safety.
Further bomb discoveries along the riverbed are expected to continue due to the low water levels, authorities said.
EasternOrthodox
Posted on: 12/10/2011 19:22
A photo of the bomb (I am using a separate comment because posting photos sometimes causes you to lose what you have typed):
See this at
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-75865.html
EasternOrthodox
Posted on: 12/21/2011 16:46
This one is more than a ghost. Some old WW II mines are actually exploding. Apparently they are becoming more unstable as they get older.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,804927,00.html#ref=nlint
12/21/2011 10:11 AM
Decaying and Deadly
WWII Mines Pose Growing Risk in Germany
Two anti-tank mines from World War II have exploded spontaneously in the ground next to a road in the eastern German state of Brandenburg. Fortunately, nobody has been hurt so far. Experts are warning that the risk of such sudden blasts is growing because the trigger mechanisms are decaying with age.
Two anti-tank mines from World War II exploded spontaneously along a road in the eastern German state of Brandenburg in the past week, confirming warnings that unexploded bombs are becoming increasingly unstable.
Last Wednesday, Dec. 14, a detonation tore a crater 10 meters (33 feet) wide next to a road between the towns of Gross Ossnig and Neuhausen, some 100 kilometers (62 miles) southeast of Berlin, Brandenburg police said. No one was hurt. One eyewitness, Gerhard Willing, said a schoolbus had just driven past the spot. "It was damned lucky that no one was hurt," he told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. The area had been a storage site for a nearby bridge construction project. "Metal struts weighing tons were dumped there, big trucks drove past and workers were constantly walking around," said Willing.
A stretch of the road subsided and the police cordoned off the area. Bomb disposal experts found two more mines nearby. They were too unstable to remove and had to be blown up where they lay on Friday. Some 400 residents living within one kilometer of the area were evacuated and told to leave their doors and windows open to prevent the glass shattering from the shockwaves.
Then, on Saturday, another mine exploded of its own accord. "Self-detonations are very rare," Torsten Schwieg, a local council official, said. "But having two go off at such a short interval is highly unusual."
The area was the scene of fighting in World War II because it was close to an airfield where newly-built Focke-Wulf combat aircraft tested their machine guns. The airfield was bombed several times.
Elderly locals recalled that weapons and munitions were thrown in a bomb crater near the airfield, one local newspaper reported. That might explain why the mines were found buried three or four meters deep -- they were evidently discarded. If they had been planted to take out a tank, they would have been placed much closer to the surface.
Unexploded shells and munitions are a common problem in Germany. Earlier this month, the country had to conduct one of its largest ever peacetime evacuations in Koblenz when some 45,000 people, half the population of the western city, had to leave their homes while experts screwed the detonators out of a British 1.8 ton bomb found in the Rhine River.
"Germany will have to deal with the munitions problem for a very long time to come," Hans-Jürgen Weise, the former bomb disposal chief for the west of Brandenburg, now retired, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "Unexploded bombs are becoming more dangerous by the day through material fatigue as a result of ageing and through the erosion of safety elements in the trigger mechanisms."
In a previous interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, in 2008, Weise recalled his team getting two or three calls a day with bombs being unearthed at construction sites or elsewhere. He said the state was particularly contaminated by American delayed-action bombs which were becoming so unstable that it would soon become impossible to defuse them safely.
The search for further mines in Neuhausen is continuing this week.
RitaTG
Posted on: 12/21/2011 17:22
I have seen another ghost of war.......
It was on my nephew's face.......
Since he came back from Afghanistan he has not been the same.
An angry hurt young man has taken his place.....
Ghosts abound........
Rita
RitaTG
Posted on: 12/21/2011 17:28
I have seen another ghost of war.......
It was on my nephew's face.......
Since he came back from Afghanistan he has not been the same.
An angry hurt young man has taken his place.....
Ghosts abound........
Rita
EasternOrthodox
Posted on: 12/22/2011 16:36
I am sorry to hear that. Did he have bad experiences?
RitaTG
Posted on: 12/22/2011 16:45
Yes EO ... his experiences were very bad......
He is now a time bomb ticking away.....
War leaves many ghosts and buried bombs.....
Thank you for this thread
Rita
MikePaterson
Posted on: 12/22/2011 19:00
This is a letter, written on Boxing Day, 1916, by my grandfather to his six-year-old daughter (my mother).
He was killed at Passchendaele, nine and a half months later.
PEACE ON EARTH!!!!
Arminius
Posted on: 12/22/2011 20:31
Hi EO:
This bomb was a "blockbuster," so named because it was capable of levelling an entire city block. Thousands of them were dropped on German cities, a few remained unexploded.
MistsOfSpring
Posted on: 12/22/2011 19:24
He was killed at Passchendaele, nine and a half months later.
Thank you for sharing the letter. It's far too easy to think of things that happened so long ago in an abstract, disconnected kind of way. Letters like this make it easier to connect to the people involved, instead of just a bunch of dates and statistics and maps. It's so sad that he never got to see his little girl again.
MikePaterson
Posted on: 12/22/2011 19:42
And he was one of more than a miliion young men killed between the Ypres Salient and the ruined village of Passchendaele a short distance away.
War is deeply eveil, deeply insane, wholly ugly and wholly destructive.
Arminius
Posted on: 12/22/2011 20:34
War is deeply evil, deeply insane, wholly ugly and wholly destructive.
Yes, war is all that—and entirely avoidable!
So let us do our best to avoid war, and the circumstances that lead to war.
MikePaterson
Posted on: 12/22/2011 22:15
It's not enough to try to avoid war: we have to MAKE peace and to make peace, we have to start with good will to ALL. Making peace is as active, challenging and materially costly as making war — it's not merely the silence of weapons. It has to be the celebration of justice.
EasternOrthodox
Posted on: 12/22/2011 23:48
Thanks for posting the letter, Mike. It is a very sad reminder of the past. And how we need to try and make sure nothing like WW I or WW II happen again.
Yes, Arminius, I am surprised to hear there is still so much unexploded ordinance in Germany. Yes, I know the WW II bombing was very severe and destroyed a large part of the country.
I was going to post a picture of the crater left when that mine exploded, but I could not do it from work, something about my browser settings.
EasternOrthodox
Posted on: 12/22/2011 23:44
Yes EO ... his experiences were very bad......
He is now a time bomb ticking away.....
War leaves many ghosts and buried bombs.....
Thank you for this thread
Rita
Is any help available, given that he is a veteran? Or he is unwilling to seek help, perhaps.