City of Brindisi (southern Italy), on Sunday had to witness the evacuation of more than half of city’s population. Approximately 54,000 people of a total 80,000 population were a part of this drill and were ordered to leave their homes. People were ordered by the authorities to evacuate their homes, due to an unexploded bomb found by the onsite builders.
Authorities cut off the gas supply, made residents move their cars and transported 217 prisoners into an alternative prison wing. Police drones flew above the deserted city to ensure no-one was roaming the streets or taking advantage of the evacuation to loot from homes and shops.
Authorities said it was one metre long, weighed about 200 kilograms and contained about 40 kilograms of dynamite.
Construction crews found the bomb by chance on November 2 while expanding a movie theatre. At the time, Brindisi Mayor Ricardo Rossie Sindaco said the bomb would not explode unless it was interfered with. But it was slightly damaged during building work, which complicated the defusing process.
Brindisi’s airport, train station, two hospitals and a prison were all evacuated. Defense Minister Lorenzo Guerini tweeted that the operation was “particularly complex” and congratulated those involved.
This is the first WWII bomb found in the city since 1945, and the evacuation is the largest undertaken in Italy since the end of the war. The operation ended before 11:15am on Sunday, when two bomb disposal experts isolated the detonator and the fuse. Authorities planned to destroy the bomb in a controlled explosion in a quarry outside the city on Monday.
According to the Centre for the Study of War, State and Society at the University of Exeter, UK, Italy was bombed by the Allies from 1940 to 1945, with the campaign starting around 24 hours after dictator Benito Mussolini declared war on Britain and France.
Even now, 70 years later, more than 2,000 tons of unexploded munitions are uncovered on German soil every year. Before any construction project begins in Germany, from the extension of a home to track-laying by the national railroad authority, the ground must be certified as cleared of unexploded ordnance.
The Italian army estimates thousands of unexploded bombs from World War II are lying dormant and undiscovered throughout the country.
Most WW2 bombs stumbled across in the 21st Century are discovered by builders digging foundations. A guide on dealing with unexploded devices was released by the Construction Industry Research and Information Association (CIRIA) in 2009.
The CIRIA guide said as well as posing a risk, the discovery of unexploded devices can have “significant implications” for builders, causing delays and an increase in costs.”In many cases these problems could have been avoided if an appropriate risk management procedure had been carried out at the initial stages of the project,” the CIRIA guide said.
Earlier this year, a bomb detonated in the middle of a German corn paddock, not far from railway depot targeted by allied forces during World War II. The explosion registered as a magnitude-1.7 tremor and left a crater 10 metres in diameter and four metres deep.
On Saturday, a bomb was discovered by engineers working on a new sewer in west London. Another was defused in Berlin in April 2018, and another was uncovered at a building site in Hong Kong in February the same year. Unexploded ordnance from WWII is regularly discovered in Europe and beyond.
They may be a century old but these devices still need to be treated cautiously and disposed off in a proper manner. It may be decades since the bombs were dropped but they serve as a good reminder of the importance of protecting peace. There is always a great deal of interest when such a device is found. They bring to life the nature of past conflicts, remind us of the huge level of destruction during two world wars and cast a shadow over our modern lives.
