22 Jan River Traffic at Cologne Interrupted for Bomb Disposal
Vessel traffic on the Rhine was briefly delayed Tuesday after construction workers found a WWII-era bomb near the river's banks.
The 1,100 pound American-made bomb was found on the bank of the Rhine in the Deutz business district near Cologne's Hohenzollern Bridge. The city's response included the closure of the bridge and the Deutz rail station, which is a key transfer hub for Germany's rail network; this led to disruption and the delay or cancellation of about 120 trains.
About 10,000 office workers were evacuated from a 500-meter exclusion zone around the site. The evacuation affected the German media group RTL and the Cologne Opera, among others.
Water traffic on the Rhine was also halted while the EOD squad dealt with the munition, and water police patrol boats enforced a cordon zone on either side of the bridge.
When all preparations were complete, the EOD squad defused the bomb in about 25 minutes. "The bomb was dropped from more than 1,000 meters, and if the detonator had been even slightly compressed, then we would have had problems removing it," squad member Stefan Höreth told RTL.
Allied air forces dropped about 1.4 million tons of bombs over Germany over the course of WWII, including about 35,000 tons dropped on Cologne. Roughly one bomb out of every 10 failed to go off; today, more than seven decades after the war's end, German bomb-disposal squads still deal with about 2,000 tonnes of unexploded munitions annually.
News source: http://maritime-executive.com Go to original post
