Koblenz Germany crater 60 feet wide demolish a city block, 45.000 men and women, almost half of the people in Koblenz, Germany, will have to leave their homes on this Sunday. Three unexploded bombs from World War II have been found in the River of the Rhine, just in the middle of the 106.000-people-Town.
The largest bomb is 1.8 ton device. It was found in the Rhine River when water levels dropped to record lows.
The 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 9 AM local time, when a bomb-disposal squad plans to defuse the 10-foot bomb dropped by British fliers, most likely in a 1944 bombing raid. The people will not be allowed to return before all three bombs are defused.
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.
The exclusion zone around the bomb is around 1.5 km. Due to the massive scale of the operation, some parts of the city have already been evacuated.
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 is a webcam covering the works near the largest bomb. But it will be put offline, when the most dfficult work to defuse the bomb starts.
- There is a twitter hashtag #bombeKO covering the works.
- Near-offical information is also mentioned by the twitter account of the local newspaper Rhein-Zeitung.
Source:rhein-zeitung
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