MAYHEM AS WWII BOMB FOUND.

1 DISCOVERY HALTS ABOUT 300 FLIGHTS

Here’s a fresh one for commuters in London: All flights to and from London City Airport were cancelled Monday after an unexploded Second World War bomb was found buried in the muck in the River Thames near the end of a runway. The Evening Standard reported: “About 300 arrivals and departures were cancelled, with about 9,000 passengers affected, as the airport was not expected to reopen until Tuesday morning.”

2 VERY BIG, VERY OLD, LIKELY FROM BLITZ

Scotland Yard said, essentially, that it was a very big, very old bomb — a tapered end shell almost two metres long and weighing half a ton. There is no word yet from the navy divers on whose bomb it was — likely the German Luftwaffe, which waged the Blitz in 1940-1941, the eight-month aerial bombardment of military and civilian targets in Britain.

3 BURIED UNDER 10 METRES OF OOZE

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said Monday that construction crews discovered this particular bomb buried under about 10 metres of ooze in the Thames at the King George V Dock near one end of London City Airport. The docklands area was a frequent target of German bombing during the war. “It is lying in a bed of dense silt and the first stage of the removal operation is to free the shell from the silt so that it can be floated for removal,” Scotland Yard said in a statement. “The timing of removal is dependent on the tides, however, at this stage we estimate that the removal of the device from location will be completed by tomorrow morning.”

4 PETS, SPIDERS, SNAKES ALL PUT DOWN

According to an article in the Express newspaper about the Blitz, “Fears of bombing led to 750,000 domestic pets being put down. London Zoo destroyed all its poisonous snakes and spiders.” In total, about 50,000 tons of high-explosive bombs were dropped during the Blitz. Wide swaths of the city were destroyed by the bombs and resulting fires.