Three bombs found on a building site were defused by a team of eight men.
Nearly 50,000 people were evacuated from their homes to allow the work to take place without risk to the public. More than 2,436 volunteers from relief organisations, the police and the fire brigade helped organise the mass evacuation to a safe radius of about 1,000m.
Pre-construction work on the site had identified locations where there appeared to be bombs, which were investigated during the evactuation. Specialists from the bomb disposal service Kampfmittelbeseitigungsdienstes (KBD) identified three British bombs from World War II on the building site. Two were able to be defused manually while a water-jet cutter was needed to help with the third. The detonators of the bombs could be successfully blown just before 6pm.
The evacuation lasted nearly nine hours.
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