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German City to Evacuate as 2-Ton Bomb Is Defused .

Quote:

DECEMBER 3, 2011.

German City to Evacuate as 2-Ton Bomb Is

By VANESSA FUHRMANS

Nearly half the residents of the German city of Koblenz are being forced to leave their homes this weekend after the discovery of a 2-ton, unexploded World War II bomb, marking the biggest bomb-related evacuation in Germany's post-war history.

Some 45,000 residents of the Rhineland city—including those in a jail, two hospitals and several nursing homes and hotels—are under orders to evacuate by Sunday, when a bomb-disposal squad plans to defuse the 10-foot bomb dropped by British fliers, most likely in a 1944 bombing raid. Found lodged in the bed of the ebbing Rhine River earlier this week, the bomb has the explosive potential to create a crater 60 feet wide and 16 feet deep and demolish a city block, authorities said.

Six and a half decades since the end of World War II, undetonated aerial bombs from the war are still routinely discovered across Germany, relics of the Allies' nearly five-year bombing campaign aimed at crippling German industry and infrastructure and withering domestic support for Hitler's war. Roughly 2,000 tons of bombs, artillery shells and other World War II munitions are discovered in Germany every year, officials estimate, by construction workers, amateur diggers or even children at play.

But in one of the driest Novembers on record, Rhine River levels have dropped dramatically, revealing an unusually large trove of unexploded bombs in its bed. In addition to the massive British bomb, bomb experts on Sunday will also dispose of a 275-pound U.S. bomb and a German smoke grenade found nearby this week. Officials say they expect to discover more devices in coming days.

The British bomb in Koblenz, now covered by just 16 inches of water, is thought to have been dropped in the night of Nov. 6, 1944, when Royal Air Force planes blanketed Koblenz with bombs and destroyed much of the inner city. By the war's end, air raids had destroyed some 80% of the city.

Horst Lenz, the 56-year-old head of the regional bomb-disposal squad tasked with defusing the devices Sunday, said the bomb is the largest among the hundreds of World War II-era bombs he has tackled since beginning his hair-raising career in 1984.

Mr. Lenz added that as unexploded bombs grow older, they are becoming ever more unstable, and increasingly likely to explode, as the elements deteriorate their chemical detonators. Still, he says Sunday's job should be fairly routine.

"There don't appear to be any special challenges to this one," he said by telephone. "It could maybe take an hour or two." As with most bomb-disposal assignments, Mr. Lenz said he isn't nervous ahead of this one. "The shivers always come afterward."

In addition to clearing a 1.1-mile security zone around the bomb, authorities plan to shut down train traffic Sunday along the country's busy Rhine stretch. They have also been building a dam of hundreds of sand bags around the bomb site to pump water out in preparation for the delicate task of defusing the device.

Though the old bombs have seldom come to casualties over the years, three bomb specialists were killed in an explosion last year just before they were about to neutralize a 1,000-pound bomb in the central German town of Göttingen—fueling renewed worries about the unpredictable dangers of the aging bombs.

Mr. Lenz and other German bomb disposal experts said it could be still decades, or even centuries, before nearly all of the tens of thousands of still-unexploded bombs estimated to be buried throughout Germany are discovered.

"Think about it: After 2,000 years, we are still finding the occasional sword from the Roman military campaigns here," he said. Compare that to the nearly 2 million tons of bombs dropped on Germany less than 70 years ago, he added, and "we definitely have a lot more to find."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...true#printMode

That article brought back some memories for an old 48C (West European FAO).

That's some bomb and most people do not realize that Central Europe, as a result of WW1 and WW2, is laden with unexploded ordnance (mortar and artillery shells, and bombs). In France, for example, there is an army engineer unit which is solely dedicated to disarming and disposing of the many such munitions found there. Farmers are especially susceptible to accidentally detonating an old shell or bomb as they plow, disc, and harrow their fields, and several are injured or killed annually because of them. An additional hazard the French face which the Germans do not is the problem of finding old, rusted, and sweating mustard gas shells left over from WW1. :eek:

As for Koblenz - I attended the BWs JugendOffizierAusbildungs in Koblenz (Deines-Bruchmüller-Kaserne) and used to take visitors to the Marksburg castle just south of there, the only castle along the Rhein which was never conquered by a marauding armed force and the seat of the DeutscheBurgenvereinigung (German Castle Association) - also, the view of the Deutsches Eck (the junction of the Rhein and Mosel rivers) from the Festung Ehrenbreitstein in the north side of Koblenz is one of the greatest views along the Rhein. Just up the Mosel from Koblenz is one of the best restored 'fairy tale' like castles of the region and one my sons loved to visit, the Reichsburg above Cochem.

Personally, I highly recommend a Rhein/Mosel river valley journey and a stop in Koblenz if you ever get the chance...just don't mess with any old bombs you may find lying around the area. ;)

And so it goes...

Richard :munchin

Attachment 20658

The Abomination of Houthulst

In a forest in Belgium, not 45 kilometers from the border of Holland, stands an enormous stockpile of poison gas out in the open, rusting, and barely guarded. The stockpile grows every day. An accident here would have unimaginable consequences.

By Rob Ruggenberg
(Translated from the Dutch by Ron Rowell)
It is spring in the Houthulst woods. Birds sing in the trees, rabbits hop over the path. It's a lovely picture that doesn't go with images of spitting, suffocating, and dying soldiers.

The high trees don't stand far from the place where in the afternoon of April 22, 1915 soldiers were attacked with poison gas for the first time in history.

It was Germans who had thought up these weapons. When the greenish-yellow cloud blew away, five thousand allied soldiers lay blue and dead in their trenches and there were ten thousand disabled for life.

The trees of Houthulst conceal even more. Hidden among the budding greenery is an open space with ten concrete platforms, each surrounded by a low earthen wall.

There they lie, piled up on wooden pallets, and sometimes just lying on the ground: tens, hundreds, thousands of shells, still filled with deadly chlorine, mustard, and phosphate gas.

Eighteen thousand duds from the First World War. Three hundred thousand kilos. Sufficient for the eradication of millions of people. And every day, more is added.

Most of the gas shells are heavily rusted. Some have partly burst open. Dozens of shells are leaking. Those have been temporarily encased in a container.

We ask Commander Philippe Pille (picture right) why these things aren't stashed away safely in concrete bunkers. His answer is upsettingly simple: "We don't have any bunkers."

Legacy

Poison gas is a particularly frightful legacy of the First World War. Only Belgium and France are affected, since the Western Front lay in these countries: a ribbon of trenches from which the Germans and the Allies attacked one other over and over for four years. Altogether 1,500,000,000 shells were shot. Thirty percent did not explode.

In West Flanders around the city of Ypres, the front was turned into a muddy wasteland. "The mud was so soft that falling shells met insufficient resistance to explode. The shells went completely through the puddles like it was butter. Blup! And the greasy clay closed in above them," Pille says.

He is the head of Explosives Clearance and Destruction and a Belgian military official. The number of live shells that now-80 years after the date-are still found daily, is not declining. Quite the contrary: 72 mine removers work at it daily, twice as many as ten years ago.

Here in the area around Ypres 200,000 to 250,000 live shells rise to the surface each year. Pille euphemistically refers to 20,000 kilos of them as "problem munitions." They contain deadly gas.

All these shells come to the surface due to the dynamics of working the ground. They are ploughed up by farmers or found by construction teams. Like in the village of Harelbeke, where construction workers dug up 78 poison gas shells.

"People think that this stuff is no longer dangerous after all this time. Nothing could be further from the truth. The charge has become chemically unstable and therefore sensitive to shocks and friction. With some shells, there is only a little spring one millimeter thick that is restraining the pin. What do you think would happen if that spring were to rust through? Each year it deteriorates more."

Full article at link below.

http://www.greatwar.nl/

The unexploded 500 pounders with time delay fuses that the Americans dropped during WWII are the worst types of ordnance that German EOD personel have to deal with. Because of the particular type of fuse that they use they are extremely volatile and can actually detonate at any time.

Had a long talk with a young German EOD worker over beers onetime. He said that it was so hard to find people who will do that type work that the organizations have to hire people with minor criminal records because that is usually the only type of work that they can find.

Correct that Germany is a minefield and they, as well as Russia, Poland, England, etc. will be policing up ordnance for a long time...