THREE MEMBERS OF THE 13-MAN BOMB DISPOSAL team were killed Tuesday night in Germany when a World War II bomb exploded before they began to defuse it. The bomb had been identified as a 500 Kg bomb that carried a delayed-action fuse, making it very unstable. It was found in a construction site in the central German city of Göttingen, buried about 20 ft. below the surface.
The city had been evacuating about 7,200 people living within a half-mile of the bomb, which was discovered on a construction site for a new sports arena. A similar bomb was detected and safely defused at the same site last Thursday, and media reports said a third unexploded bomb had been found. Der Spiegel describes what happened:
Three members of a bomb disposal team were killed …. two people were seriously injured and four received slight injuries in the explosion which happened just as the surrounding area was being evacuated. All the casualties belonged to the 13-member Lower Saxony bomb disposal team. Police are investigating what caused the explosion. Reports said it went off before the specialists had begun trying to defuse it. The explosion hurled deadly shrapnel for hundreds of meters but no one else was hurt because the area had been evacuated.
Firefighters run to the still-smoking bomb site after it
unexpectedly detonated. (dpa photo)“The bomb exploded at 9:36 p.m. while the disposal was being prepared. We have to investigate what preparatory actions were taking place at the time,” the president of the Göttingen police, Robert Kruse, told a news conference on Wednesday. “The men who died were highly experienced specialists in defusing unexploded bombs from World War II,” Kruse said. They were aged 38, 52 and 55 and had been doing their dangerous work for decades. “They had been in the job for 20 to 30 years and had removed between 600 and 700 bombs. Their work protected the population.”
Fire department spokesman Frank Gloth told daily Bild: “We’d got the evacuation measures well under way. The workers from the bomb squad began to carry out the first preparatory operations … for the disarming. That’s when the bomb exploded.” They had not yet begun handling the bomb itself yet.
This identical bomb was defused and removed from
the same worksite this past Thursday. (dpa photo)
More than 2,000 tons of American and British aerial bombs and all kinds of munitions ranging from German hand grenades and anti-tank mines to Russian artillery shells are recovered each year in Germany.
Expatica has MORE.
Also on FireGeezer…
- Koblenz – Safe Again (Updated) – December 4, 2011
- Koblenz Ka-Boom Prevention – Part 2 – December 3, 2011
- Chemical Fire Leaves Colorful Runoff in Germany – March 2, 2012
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