A major incident was reported with roads closed and no-fly zones instated after a live World War II bomb was found on a new housing estate.
The 500lb explosive, which was set to be safely discharged by ordnance specialists, was uncovered by construction workers at The Greenways housing development in Goole, East Riding of Yorkshire.
A large police cordon was set up around the device, with parts of the M52 and nearby roads closed as the ordeal looked set to ensure travel chaos for much of the day.
Humberside Police said neighbours in Rawcliffe Road had been urged to vacate the area as a precaution, and residents living in the immediate neighbourhood were advised to remain indoors, while businesses inside the cordoned-off area were asked to temporarily close.
The east and westbound carriageways of the M62, between J35 and J37, alongside a section of the A614, had been closed since 8 pm on Friday, July 23.
A statement on Humberside Police’s website read that colleagues from the Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team, who’d been onsite, had now established that the device was live and that they were making plans to safely discharge the bomb, and that all persons in the immediate neighbourhood had been evacuated as a precaution.
The people that dropped the bomb obviously didn’t know that it might explode 80 years later. Although it’s not exploded for 80 years, so it’s debatable whether it will explode now – not worth taking the gamble though, just in case it’s not a dud, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be digging it out to take a look to see if it’s a goer – anybody want to volunteer?
If it didn’t work when it was dropped out of a plane 80 years ago, then it probably isn’t going to work now until the ammunitions specialists get there and put plastic explosives around it and blow it up.
Now it’s all just drama and we have a no-fly zone for a bomb. Health and safety gone mad again, but it was once seemingly safe enough to drop it from an aircraft, although when it was dropped from an aircraft the intention was that it would explode.
I guess there’s no real harm done because the bomb disposal team will have it sorted out, and there’s probably far more unexploded bombs in Europe, probably spread around Germany and France, and if they do go off, perhaps it will remind them to be nice to us.
They said that an unexploded bomb caused chaos, very climactic, next they’ll be telling us that the International Space Station was re-routed!
And we would never cope today with what people coped with during World War II and rationing lasting for a decade after – good job they’d not heard of Mental Health.
