AUGSBURG, Germany –– About 54,000 residents of the southern German city of Augsburg had to leave their homes on Sunday as authorizes defused a 2-ton bomb, in what was described as the country’s biggest evacuation since World War II.
It took explosives specialists about 4 hours to defuse the bomb, a police spokesman said.
After the evacuation, 900 police officers and hundreds of firefighters checked the area to a mile away to make sure no one remained.
There were isolated cases of people having to be induced into leaving the danger zone.
In addition to private residences, a hospital and more than a dozen facilities for the elderly were also evacuated.
The British bomb was discovered last Tuesday during construction work. A protective barrier about a 3 feet high was been built around the bomb in case it exploded.
The actual task of defusing the bomb could only begin between 2-3 pm, police spokesman Manfred Gottschalk said earlier in the day.
Authorities decided to defuse the aircraft bomb on Christmas Day, arguing that it would be easier to carry out on a public holiday than a normal work day.
The city set up emergency lodgings in six areas large enough to accommodate 3,100 people. As of Sunday however only about 1,000 people had used the facilities, confirming authorities’ assumptions that most evacuees would choose to stay with family or friends.
Unexploded bombs dating back to the aerial bombardments of Germany during World War II are still frequently found. Many local authorities have teams working full time to find and defuse them.
Before Sunday, the biggest evacuation in Germany since the end of the war took place in 2011, when 45,000 people were forced to temporarily leave parts of Koblenz for the disposal of an unexploded Allied bomb.
In 2009, a Russian bomb from World War II was discovered just outside the Berlin apartment of Chancellor Angela Merkel, triggering a city-center lockdown and an evacuation that included Merkel.
