Bomb Explodes Near Us

Shortly after we’d been at a local park a bomb exploded there.

I’m practising to be a news headline writer for newspapers. Reading further into the article we discover that, indeed, we had been at the park…three days before the explosion. The bomb, however, was not a terrorist attack. It was an unexploded British mortar from World War 2! A local resident had found it while digging his vegetable garden. The bomb disposal team was called in, took it to the park we’d earlier been to and, in a controlled, by-the-book method, cleared the area and destroyed the bomb.

The truth isn’t nearly as exciting as the headline, is it?

This video is TV coverage of our bomb.

I got the following article from a newspaper printed last year.

The First World War bombs that are still killing people in France 

Despite the First World War taking place 100 years ago, unexploded shells are still being found in France - and since the end of the war 360 people have been killed and 500 injured in the town of Ypres.

British and German forces launched more than a billion shells and bombs at each other as they fought in vain to break the stalemate in the mud on the Western Front.

The lethal ordnance killed millions on both sides during the first world war – and it continues to do so to this day.

Nearly 100 years since the conflict ended, an estimated 300 million unexploded bombs lie buried under farmland of Northern France and Belgium. As recently as March, two construction workers in Ypres died when a shell exploded.

The Belgians call it the iron harvest, and there is a team of army bomb disposal experts permanently stationed here.

In the past four years alone, they have removed some 629 tons of bombs, shells and other explosives on former battle lines in Flanders. More and more are being found because of growing development in the region and modern tractors ploughing much deeper than in the past.