Public safety incident

Authorities unearthed an unexploded Second World War bomb in Klettenberg Park in Cologne and had to dispose of it immediately. Roughly 8,400 people were told to evacuate an area within a 500-meter radius of the site.Authorities from the western German city of Cologne moved to disarm an unexploded bomb unearthed in a park in the southwest of the city.The British-made ten-hundredweight bomb (equivalent to roughly 450 kilos) with a rear-firing detonator required immediate disarming, city services said. "To this end, the danger zone needs to be blocked off and evacuated," the city said, with the North Rhine-Westphalia state's bomb disposal units and city public order officers on site. "The final danger zone was set at a radius of 500 meters by the bomb disposal service. Roughly 8,400 people will be affected by the evacuation. Exactly when the bomb will be disposed of is not yet clear," authorities said on Thursday afternoon.A temporary shelter was set up nearby in a local school in the Lindenthal district.Such bomb disposal operations are very common in Cologne, with the most recent of its kind taking place exactly a week earlier, on November 27.The city was a crucial industrial, cultural, and nodal point for Nazi Germany during the war. It was also one of the more viable targets for bombing raids launched from the British mainland while Germany occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands before the D-Day landings of 1944.Located in western Germany, and slightly nearer the north than the south, it was one of the larger cities further inland — discounting the most accessible northern ports like Hamburg — that were in range of early World War II bombers and that involved crews taking somewhat fewer risks flying over anti-aircraft defenses.Cologne was the target of the first of the "thousand bomber raids" conducted by Britain's Royal Air Force in the summer of 1942, on the night of May 30 and 31. The bombardment famously flattened a large portion of Cologne's city center, while missing its renowned cathedral on the banks of the Rhine almost entirely.