Hundreds of students evacuated from UK university after unexploded WWII bomb was discovered

Hundreds of students at the University of Exeter in southwest England have been evacuated from their residences after a bomb, still unexploded, from World War II was discovered., police reported on Saturday.

Twelve student residences in Exeter and around 100 other nearby properties were evacuated on Friday evening.

Police surrounded the area around the explosive device, 2.5 meters by 70 centimeters, in order to be inspected this Saturday by a British squad.

Residents inside the cordon were asked to leave their property and stay out of the area while experts carry out the work to ensure the device is safe.

Law enforcement officials said they expected the work to be completed by the end of Saturday. A spokesperson for the Devon and Cornwall Police asked people not to approach the scene.

The pump has been reported to 9:20 a.m. on Friday and the University of Exeter evacuated 12 residences as well as several other buildings on its Streatham campus.

In a tweet, the university noted that the device was found by masons working on private property near the university campus and that the students were temporarily accommodated in hotels in the city.

Recently, more than 8,000 residents of the city of Gotinga, in central Germany, were evacuated so that experts could defuse four suspected bombs discovered during World War II.

Experts found four ten-ton bombs belonging to the US military and decided to carry out a controlled detonation.

In Germany, the discovery of bombs from World War II is still common. In fact, in June 2010, three members of a demining team were killed and six people injured when a WWII bomb exploded in Göttingen during attempts to defuse the device.

In Italy, last January bomb squad successfully defused a WWII bomb the discovery of which forced the evacuation of thousands of people in the Italian city of Bolzano in the north of the country.

The deactivation operations lasted about two hours, during which evacuated approximately 4,500 inhabitants in the affected area.

The bomb was dropped by an American plane and weighed 200 kilograms. It was found during construction work near the city’s train station.

In contrast, in Poland, a British bomb from Second World War It erupted last October when army demolition specialists attempted to secure it underwater in the northwest of the country. No one was hurt.

The bomb Big boy, of 5.4 tons was found in September 2019 at the bottom of a canal that leads to the port of Szczecin during pipeline deepening work. More than 750 people were evacuated for the sapper operation on the southern edge of the popular seaside resort of Swinoujscie, in the Baltic sea, that, as Szczecin It was a very busy Nazi military port during the war.

Polish demolition experts attempted to neutralize the underwater bomb by blasting from a distance, which involved burning the explosives, but the device detonated in the process.

(With information from EFE, Europa Press, AP and AFP)

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