Germany is the bomb... literally

It might be hard to believe, but there is a very real (though small) risk that Noah and I could die from WWII.  How is this possible?  Glad you asked!  Since the end of WWII, finding live bombs (or more formally – unexploded ordnances - UXOs) in Germany is still the norm.  As in, just last week there was an old American bomb found near our train station, Laim.  They had to shut down the station as a precaution as they deactivated and removed the roughly 70 year old bomb. 

Approximately 600 tons of unexploded munitions are discovered yearly in our new country.  And this article from the BBC says that in Berlin alone, the Allies dropped about 465,000 tons of explosives, and about 1 in 8 bombs didn’t detonate.  “As Germany hastily rebuilt its cities after the war, authorities didn’t have the time or the means to locate and dispose of a large part of that tonnage” (another good article found here).  These discoveries are so common that most cases only make the local news. 

Luckily the odds of us riding our bikes and exploding into the air like the cartoons is pretty slim.  Most of these bombs are found during construction work.  And it is so common, they scan the area specifically for bombs before breaking ground on new developments.   Though sometimes, like in late 2011, they find one when the water levels drop.  The city of Koblenz had a prolonged dry spell, and two bombs dropped by the Royal Air Force in the early 1940s were discovered in the riverbed of the Rhine.  They had to evacuate almost half of the town (45,000 people) – including a prison and 2 hospitals – while they sent in the experts.

However these are still real, active explosives in the ground, and sometimes the inevitable happens.  2 years ago three people were killed by a 1,000 pound bomb in Göttingen, Germany.  “The bomb was unearthed during construction of a sports stadium, and exploded an hour before it was to be defused, killing the three experienced bomb technicians on-site” (article found here).  I guess I should be glad that in my research for this blog, I only found this one instance of someone dying.  But I am sure there are more – just not in the top results these days. 

While this topic could spawn many emotionally loaded conversations regarding war, especially with this being about WWII, I’ll leave that for non-internet discussions.  Instead, I will send a cheers to those brave (or crazy) folks who decide to be bomb diffusers in Germany – you guys make all of Germany safer.