Divers work to defuse massive WW2 ‘earthquake’ bomb
WARSAW: Navy divers yesterday began a fiveday operation to defuse the largest unexploded World War 2 bomb ever found in Poland, forcing more than 750 people to evacuate their homes.
Dubbed the ‘‘earthquake’’ bomb, the Tallboy bomb was used by Britain’s Royal Air Force and weighs nearly 5400kg, including 2400kg of explosive, the navy said on its Facebook page.
The bomb was found in the Piast Canal, which connects the Baltic Sea with the Oder River, and was dropped by the RAF in 1945 in an attack on the German cruiser Lutzow. The site is near the town of Swinoujscie in northwest Poland where a liquefied natural gas terminal was opened in 2016.
‘‘There will be no deliveries while the bomb is being neutralised,’’ a spokeswoman at site operator GazSystem said.
‘‘We dug up the moving part of the bomb. The middle part the bomb was left, as planned, so that the debris around it would keep the bomb in a fixed place, so that it would not move and the fuses would not be triggered,’’ Michal Jodloski, from the 12th Minesweeper Squadron of the 8th Coastal Defense Flotilla, told private broadcaster TVN 24. — Reuters