54k people evacuated after huge WWII-bomb found in German city
German authorities have forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from a southern city to safe places after a giant explosive, dating from World War II, was discovered in the area.
The unwelcome Christmas surprise, a 1.8-ton British aerial bomb, which was found in Augsburg, Bavaria province, made local authorities on Sunday to evacuate more than 54,000 inhabitants from 32,000 households in a radius of 1.5 kilometers around the bomb.
Up to 2,500 police officers, personnel from rescue services and fire brigades were involved in the mass evacuation, the biggest mobilization in Germany since the war itself. In the early hours of Sunday, they rang doorbells and used vans equipped with loudspeakers to call on procrastinators to abandon the zone ahead of a 10 a.m. deadline.
"Today I ask everyone concerned to leave the area, if possible by themselves," said Augsburg mayor Kurt Gribi in a video message posted on the city's Twitter account, urging "each person to verify that their relatives, parents and friends have found places to stay outside the (security) zone... Look out for one another."
According to authorities, the defusing could last up to five hours, and evacuees, comprising one fifth of the total population of the city, would not be able to return home before evening.
The huge bomb had been dropped by the British Air Force, then part of the Allied Forces, in the 1940s, and was discovered during construction work on Tuesday.
Similar evacuations are not unusual in Germany. Back in 2011, at least 45,000 people were evacuated following the discovery of a large WWII-bomb in the town of Koblenz. A further 20,000 people were evacuated in Cologne in 2015 after a 200-kilogram bomb, left from the war, was found there.
Another 1.8-ton aerial bomb, found in Dortmund in 2014, made authorities to evacuate about 17,000 people.
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