So, that happened

[selenak]

One of several advantages for spending the summer with the Aged Parents in Bamberg: I didn't have to get evacuated on Tuesday night when a World War II bomb had to be blown up (as it couldn't get deactivated) in Schwabing, the Munich quarter where I live. The explosion was captured in the vid below; our paper today remind us that 4,.000, of these simultanously were the avarage during the war nights when Munich got bombed. What I wonder is: given we're still dealing with leftover bombs from WWII more then 70 years later (and this was by no means the first time something like this happened in the city where I usually live; I remember sitting in a train when they told us we couldn't leave the Munich railway station because a WWII bomb had been found and had to be secured first), how long will our descendants have to deal with leftover weapons from today?

In case the embedding doesn't work, the vid is here.

Sprengung der Fliegerbombe / Schwabing, München / 28.8.2012 from Simon Aschenbrenner on Vimeo.

Comments

[ide_cyan]

That explosion made the national news here. I hope your place is okay; they also showed damage the explosion caused around the area.

[selenak]

That's actually an ongoing worry because the neighbour who has my keyes is holidaying in Southern Tyrolia. I won't find out for sure until the 3rd when I go to Munich (can't before that) for a day. My place isn't in the immediate neighbourhood, thank God, but theoretically the windows could be broken. I hope not!

[ide_cyan]

Good luck!

[ratcreature]

They still find about 500 every year in Hamburg, though that counts also smaller munitions detritus like grenades and such, not just big bombs. Thankfully the worst I've had so far with this kind of mess were traffic disruptions, but there were evacuations and such not too long ago. Currently here they find them most often in the harbor, where they are building that new Hafencity neighborhood, so there's a lot of digging, and obviously as the area was heavily carpet bombed there are still some around. Quite often just this kind with the nasty delayed action chemical detonator too.

[selenak]

500 per year? Brrrrrr.

[ratcreature]

That's what the city's website says, though the number of bombs among that is less. In the press the last number I've seen was that 2009 it was about 160 bombs found. They estimate that there are still some three thousand left underground in the city. Kind of disconcerting to think that there are still so many explosives rotting in the ground. Hamburg as a city stopped clearing areas systematically in 2005 for financial reasons, because it was just "too expensive". They also changed who has to cover the expenses for this with building projects. Now anyone who builds has to pay for checking the ground themselves.

And so many other nasty effects still from this stuff, like the problem Usedom still has with phosphorus from firebombs that landed in the water, didn't ignite and now that they rotted it gets washed ashore, then people confuse it with amber (it combines apparently with other stuff in the bombs as they corrode and looks exactly like amber), and as soon as it dries it ignites with the air and people get badly burned. And the vapors as well as touching it are extremely poisonous too. I remember reading earlier this year about a woman who was badly injured from that, and it's not a rare thing. :(

[surexit]

Holy hell, four thousand?

[selenak]

Quite. I can't emotionally grasp it, either. :(

[cadenzamuse]

Courtesy of my history buff husband: fire bombing was actually way more destructive (yeah, that's as precisely as I remember, sorry) and I believe more cost effective than the use of the A-bomb. The A-bomb just had a huge psychological effect, and then, of course, massive radiation-related issues for years afterward. Human beings are so lovely to one another, aren't they? :(

[selenak]

Robert McNamara said the same thing in the documentary The Fogs of War when talking about the Tokyo firebombing (as a young man, he was part of the planning staff under Curtis Le May). He added that if the US had lost the war, they could have all been with some justification persecuted for war crimes because of this. I hasten to add that the same is true for the German bombings, and we started it, I never forget that!