Train traffic from and into Paris’ Gare du Nord, the third-busiest train station in the world, was severely disrupted Friday morning after the discovery of an unexploded World War II bomb on the tracks.
The bomb was found in the wee hours of the morning in St. Denis, a suburb north of Paris, according to city police. The bomb was about 1.55 miles (2.5 kilometers) from Gare du Nord, which services over 200 million travelers each year, and was revealed by an earth-mover during landscaping work. Its removal is resulting in significant delays and cancellation of trains in and out of Paris.
According to SNCF, the state-owned railway company, normal train traffic is not expected to resume until Friday evening, and some trains that ordinarily pass through Gare du Nord will instead pass through Gare de Lyon.
The bomb was found on the Paris train network’s H line, which services the region north of Paris. The New York Times reported that the explosive is about 3 feet (0.91 meters) long and more than 400 pounds (181 kilograms), and a large security perimeter was established to safely remove it.
Videos on social media revealed the orderly but frustrating state of affairs at the famous train station, where passengers stood with luggage as they awaited news about their trains. The international rail service Eurostar planned to cancel all trains in and out of Gare du Nord, Reuters reported.
Explosive relics of wars gone by disrupt daily life more often than you’d think. In October, a 500-pound (227-kg) American bomb from the Second World War abruptly exploded under a taxiway of Japan’s Miyazaki Airport, injuring no one but causing the cancellations of more than 80 flights.
In a study published last year, a group of researchers found that live ordnance from both the First and Second World Wars are increasingly likely to detonate as they age—so when the bombs are discovered, it’s critical that they are dealt with as the serious threats to life and infrastructure that they are.
In the study, the team investigated the sensitivity of German Amatol bombs found in Norway and produced before May 1945. Though the researchers could not conclusively determine what caused the ordnance to be more detonation-prone, they offered a few possibilities: the formation of salts that sensitize the explosive cocktail in the bombs, the contamination of the Amatol with metals in the ground, or simply that, like all things, the bombs get creakier and lose structural integrity over the decades.
Over 2,000 tons of munitions are found in Germany each year, and in the UK thousands of these explosives are dealt with annually. According to Atlas Obscura, about 60,000 pieces of unexploded ordnance are found each year. Belgium is still dealing with explosive relics of the First World War—which ended over a century ago.
The disruption at Gare du Nord is expected to persist for the rest of the day—but that’s a small price to pay for the safe disposal of the live ordnance, which has sat miraculously undisturbed under the train tracks for at least 80 years.
English (US) ·