Images of the detonation were shared by the Polish Navy on Facebook.
A massive World War II bomb exploded during a delicate operation Tuesday to deactivate the five-ton device in a canal near the Baltic Sea, but no one was injured, Polish officials said.
The device, nicknamed “Tallboy” and also known as a “seismic bomb”, was dropped by the Royal Air Force in an attack on a Nazi warship in 1945.
It was discovered last year embedded at a depth of 12 meters (39 feet) with only its nose sticking out during dredging near the port city of Swinoujscie in northwestern Poland.
At more than twenty feet long, it was loaded with 2.4 tons of explosives, equivalent to around 3.6 tons of TNT.
The Navy had previously said it had ruled out the traditional option of a controlled blast for fear of destroying a bridge located about 500 meters away.
Instead, he had planned to use a technique known as deflagration to burn the explosive charge without causing a detonation, using a remotely controlled device to pierce through the projectile and start combustion.
But in the end “the deflagration process turned into a detonation,” said Grzegorz Lewandowski, spokesman for the eighth coastal defense flotilla of the Polish navy based in Swinoujscie.
“There has been no risk to the people directly involved,” he said, adding that the bomb “can be considered neutralized.”
A spokesman for the Swinoujscie city council told AFP that it had not heard any reports of people injured during the operation of the military divers, nor of damage to the city’s infrastructure.
– Hundreds evacuated –
Before the operation began this week, Lewandowski had called it “a very delicate job”, adding that “the slightest vibration could detonate the bomb.”
Some 750 local residents had been urged beforehand to evacuate from a 2.5-kilometer (1.6-mile) area around the bomb, although some had told AFP they would stay there.
Halina Paszkowska had said that the “main danger” for her was the risk of contracting Covid-19 in a sports hall where residents received shelter during the operation.
“I have lived here 50 years and there have been other bombs, but this is the first time there has been an evacuation! Before, we just had to stay inside,” he said.
Maritime traffic on the shipping channel and surrounding waterways was also suspended in an area of 16 kilometers around the bomb disposal operation.
During World War II, Swinoujscie, at the time Swinemuende, a part of Germany, was home to one of the most important Baltic bases in the German navy and was the target of massive bombardment, said historian Piotr Laskowski, author of a book about the Royal Air Force raid on the German cruiser Luetzow in April 1945.
The ship’s cannons were being used to slow down the advance of the Red Army in the last days of the war.
On April 16, 1945, the RAF dispatched 18 Lancaster bombers from 617 Squadron, known as the “Dambusters”.
The bombers attacked the Luetzow with 12 Tallboys, including the one that did not explode at the time.
Tallboys were designed to explode underground alongside a target, setting off shock waves that would cause destruction.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
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