80 year old relic found, too bad there isn't anybody left to spank

Yesterday when work ended a colleague came to me and sympathised with me telling me along my way home they found a dud 250kg English bomb.

I remember that I read around 1985-1990 that the quality of Allied bombs left 15-20% as duds. 80 years after the war ended neither the developer of the bomb nor any factory workers producing faulty bombswon't be around for a spanking.

Today I called up the Internet page of my city and there was a map of where the found it including the marked spots where the put up the check points to keep bomb tourists away. To me it looks like they were providing a map to plan on how best to approach the site. Really smart that the highest danger zone is marked green. Out of security reasons people have to leave their home in this zone. Approximately 4200 people were affected. The old Synagogue was just outside the blue zone where you are supposed to stay inside.

If it wasn't such an extraordinary situation it might make a good spanking story. People not leaving the danger zone and you could spank the planners of this map too. But then the defusing might go wrong resulting in dead and property damage.

Officially they were waiting for 14 tons of sand first to detonate the dud, but today you could read that they defused it.

There are many tons of bombs leftover from the war.
I know they found one some years ago in the city where I was stationed, but it was well after I left.

This is an interesting account. Just this year a bomb was found from WW Two off the reservation at Fort Bragg. The un-exploded mine was detonated by a military bomb squad near Southern Pines/Pinehurst.

I meant to add I was in Germany.

Good news for the British aka English people, the American bombs of Worl War II were equally bad. On Thursday they found another dud, this time an American dud.
It got my attention because they wrote it was number four within the last two weeks.
At 3pm they announced they planned on defusing it at 5pm. At 6:25pm They stated the people from the danger zone were evacuated and at 6:53pm that the 250kg bomb was defused.
Always nice if you aren't affected.

Update vom 6. Juli, 18:53 Uhr: Die Entschärfung der amerikanische Fünf-Zentner-Bombe ist erfolgreich abgeschlossen. Alle Sperrungen werden nun nach und nach wieder aufgehoben. Insgesamt wurden 1600 Menschen evakuiert. In der Betreuungsstelle fanden sich über 60 Bürger ein. Insgesamt wurden 24 Menschen mit Krankentransporten in die Betreuungsstelle gebracht. „Die Verwaltung bedankt sich bei allen Beteiligten für die gute Arbeit“, so die Stadt Essen.

Update vom 6. Juli, 18:25 Uhr: Die Evakuierungsmaßnahmen wurden abgeschlossen. „Die Entschärfung kann jetzt beginnen“, teilt die Stadt Essen mit.

I wonder how many bombs the French will find as they dig that new canal. It's going through what was the Western Front in the Great War.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/canal-seine-nord-europe-5-5-billion-western-front-spc-intl /index.html

Goodgulf
I think the main front was more likely in Belgium than France, but proceeding from the German-French border into France you will come to Verdun which got infamous for a bloody German campaign.
Since both World Wars take a large empty space in the German curriculum at school I can't help you much.
Since Moody is a lazy ... I saved time and did't watch your CNN link and simply rely on what I remember.

Often123
The city of Essen as home of the Krupp company was the target of probably a dozen so called 1000 bomber raids.At each of this raids probably up to 10,000 HE bombs got dropped that means more than 100,000 bombs in total and it seems 250kg aka 551lbs was the most common size. Which raises the question were the bombs measured in kg or pounds (lbs) and are they simply using kg nowadays since in the last decade Germany used the metric pound 2 metric pounds equal 1kg. In 1990 I read that up to 20% were duds. The bulk got defused directly after the attacks and after the war when photos got examined. In the forest in Duisburg I remember a line of craters all in the same distance to each other with a second line i some distance beside it with a single crater missing. 40 to 50 years after the war the small 'crater' where the dud fell was no longer visible but the detonated bomb craters still were visible.

Yes, Americans used the pound for measuring weight then, not the kilogram.
As you know, the Krupp works were a major target.
Smaller cities were hit if the main targets were inaccessible due to weather conditions, and there was no point returning to base with a full bomb load. Some were hit so it would become more difficult for German forces to regroup around the end of the war, though there wasn't a high value to those targets otherwise.