Evacuated from home

Some of you have been asking me to write more personal stuff on my blog, even write about things which have nothing to do with my football work, but rather with everyday life here in Germany.

Well, what happened yesterday afternoon and evening here in my home town of Remscheid was something more unusual, something to write about. But it showed how well trained the emergency services are to cope with such a situation.


What happened?

Yesterday around 11.30 h in the protestant cemetery of Remscheid City work was going on to dip out a new grave with an excavator. It is usual work until it hits a metal object and the alerted driver realises he has hit a bomb. It is a relict from the second World War, a British bomb weighing over five tons, which has been lying idle underground for over 65 years.

The authorities are alerted and the way the bomb is placed with acid coming out of the fuse it has to be defused asap as one such bomb still explodes every year here in Germany.

The authorities have to decide what to do besides defusing the bomb. Then the emergency systems of the city and state are alerted as in an area of 250 metres around the bomb everyone has to be evacuated and shifted into a temporary shelter, while in a 500 metres radius people are asked to stay indoors and ideally go down into their cellars.


Coming home

I returned home at around 18.15 h realising something isn't right. The fire service department had their emergency head quarter truck infront of our house, then there are loads of police vans parked on all sides. I go in, settle down and then go onto the net.

Luckily there is a service called Google News were I am able to read that the above mentioned bomb has been found. I go down and tell my parents that we might be evacuated, so we should be prepared and exactly that happens an hour later around 19.15 h. The police come into our house and ask us to leave.

At this time my thoughts are this might take an hour or two and then we could return home. But when I ask the fire department chief how long it could take he gives me a grim answer. The fuse is lying in a tricky position this might take the whole night, he asked us to shift to the temporary shelter.


Temporary Shelter

Everything is organised. City buses are standing by to transfer the people to a school about four kilometres away, which could be our night shelter. We take a bus with around 20 others and arrive at the school which has a large cafeteria where dinner would be served. Around 500 to 600 people have to be evacuated for which the services have organised everything at short notice.

A TV reporter is roaming around to interview people. He comes to me get a statement on the whole episode. Around 21.00 h it is time for dinner. Two kinds of soup - pea & chicken - are being served along with baguette bread. A nice hot meal on an evening where the sky was blue, but it meant in the late hours it would get cool.

Just before 22.00 h we get the good news that the bomb has been defused and the fuse detonated. Spontaneously people start clapping as we all now know, we can go home and sleep in our own beds.

By 22.15 h were are back home again after the bus brought us back, the city centre is deserted with only the emergency head quarter truck active, but around it pubs and eateries closed with no crowds. It looked like nothing had happened and it might just be a holiday evening with everything being so quiet.

In the morning no one would have thought what they would go through by the end of the day, but it was good to see the state system successfully in action once such an emergency arises...