More than 170 Second World War-era practice bombs have been found beneath a playground in England during a renovation of the site, reflecting the long legacy of a war that ended nearly 80 years ago.
The first two bombs were discovered last month by workers digging foundations at Scotts Park in the northeastern town of Wooler, about an hour’s drive north of Newcastle, the BBC reported. The British Defense Ministry said a full survey of the site is needed, and in just two days contractors found 155 bombs in a 21-square-foot area.
“It soon became apparent that the scale of the problem was far greater than anyone had anticipated,” the local council said in a news release.
The council described the ordnance as “practice bombs” but stressed that “they do still carry a charge and given the numbers involved, need to be recovered by professionals.”
A total of 176 bombs have been discovered so far, according to the BBC. Wooler Councillor Mark Mather of the Conservative Party told the British broadcaster that only about one-third of the park has been cleared and that “we could still find another pit with more bombs.”
“It’s quite something to think the children have been playing on bombs, and it’s been a really challenging situation,” he said.
Mather told Sky News that the devices weigh between 9 and 11½ pounds, and he said the council plans to move ahead with the new playground after receiving a certification that the area is safe.
Andrew Stewart, an honorary professor at the Australian National University who studies the Second World War, noted that such training rounds would have been used by the Home Guard, a civil defense organization trained to ward off a German invasion that never came.
Today, they “could still cause quite a serious injury” if incorrectly handled, he said. But because the practice rounds are likely to contain only a small projectile charge and do not include any high explosive, he said he is “more worried about other caches, other dumps of weapons that were perhaps more lethal,” being found elsewhere.
It’s not uncommon to stumble upon unexploded ordnance in Britain. A 2018 BBC report cited the British Defense Ministry as saying that it had been involved in making safe some 450 German bombs from the Second World War over the past eight years – or about 60 bombs per year.
Last February, British military personnel removed a 1,100-pound the Second World War bomb from the garden of a residential property in Plymouth, a city in southwestern England, prompting what the government described as “one of the largest evacuation operations since the end of World War Two.”
Stewart said the practice bombs in Wooler were probably discarded in haste by soldiers eager to get home. “There was a lot of exhaustion at the end of the war,” he said, noting that soldiers stationed in a slightly remote location probably buried the devices thinking they would not harm anyone.
But, Stewart added, “as urban expansion continues, more of these legacies will be stumbled upon.”