An explosion late Sunday night in the German district of Limburg-Ahlbach awakened residents and registered a 1.7 magnitude earthquake. The source of the explosion was pinpointed to a cornfield where drone photographs showed a mega-crater measuring 30 feet in diameter, as initially reported by German newspaper Hessischer Rundfunk.
Initially unsure of the cause of the explosion, local police later determined that the crater was ‘almost certainly’ caused by a self-ignited World War II era bomb. Residents were not surprised that the bomb would be found in that area, with a spokesman for the area noting that the field was well within an area heavily targeted by Allied forces toward the end of the war. He said, “With the former railway depot, we were quite a bomb target at the end of the Second World War.” In addition to the train station known to be a workshop for locomotives, the town was also along a major route that was used to extract German soldiers, which made it a prime target for Allied bombers.
It is estimated that U.S. and British bombers dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs over Europe between 1940-1945 according to the Smithsonian. Unexploded munitions are commonly recovered throughout western Europe during construction projects.
The farmer closest to the cornfield where the explosion occurred said he felt a bit of humming and shaking in the middle of the night, but did not get up to see what had caused the disturbance. No one was injured in the explosion.
Photos posted to Hessischer Rundfunk’s Instagram account noted that the hole caused by the explosion was nearly four feet deep.
