Photos 500 lbs WW2-era bomb spontaneously detonates in German field

muck

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Picture taken by the Limburg Police Department

The dud detonated at about 4 am in a field near the German city of Limburg, approximately 4 meters or 13 feet underground. EOD experts have identified the ammunition as a 500 lbs bomb with a chemically delayed-action fuze, designed to kill personnel responding to emergencies in the wake of an air raid. A farmstead some 150 meters away was damaged by the explosion, its owner suffering minor injuries.

With more than 300000 aerial bombs unaccounted for in modern-day Germany alone, this is quite unsettling news. Smaller ammunitions such as mortar grenades or land mines do go off in these parts every now and again, but this is the first reported incident since 1957 of a full-fledged aerial bomb going off without any external interference whatsoever. In 2010, three EOD experts were killed when an aerial bomb readied for disposal detonated on a construction site in Central Germany. In 2006, a construction worker was killed when his pavement milling machine struck an aerial bomb buried underneath.
 
Yikes. There are two good things about this event though: The EOD is gone, and it chose a convenient time to go off when there was no activity directly in said field.

Speedy recovery to the farmer.
 
Speedy recovery to the farmer.
A local newspaper says he was treated by a general practitioner for an injury related to when he hit the deck, so he should be fine.

If I were him, I'd buy a lottery ticket now and see what happens. The chances of winning should be greater than the risk of becoming a victim of World War 2 eighty years on in time. At least that's what I hope.

That's gotta mess with your head, though. He's an old guy, it seems, so he'd probably passed the exact resting place of the dud many a time.
 
Satistically it happens once a year that a dud goes off by itself. In 2011 a dud exploded near the Isar canal in Unterföhring, lots of people cycle or walk by it daily.


List of spontaneous self detonations:

https://gubd.de/geo/luftbildauswertung/kampfmittel/48-stichwort-selbstdetonation
 

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