There were long delays today at Gare du Nord—a train station in Paris that is one of the busiest on earth. The delays were a little bit more than the usual late train, as a World War II-era bomb was found in Saint-Denis, a suburb just north of the station.
The discovery was made when workers were conducting routine landscaping work at a bridge renovation site. The crew is lucky to not have triggered a detonation since a heavy earthmoving machine is what revealed the bomb.
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The 1,000-pound bomb that contained 400 pounds of explosive material was found buried six feet underground. As tends to happen after the discovery of an 80-year-old, 1,000-pound bomb near an extremely busy train station, all train traffic was halted. That included the Eurostar, the high-speed rail service that connects Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK.
World War II-Era Bomb Found Near Paris Train Station
The bomb squad was immediately called in as over 300 police officers secured a large perimeter around the area. They temporarily evacuated nearby residents, locking down schools and a nearby retirement home, you know, just in case.
Everyone hoping to catch a train didn’t have much choice but to just hang around and wait for a deadly relic of a bygone era to be neutered. While the bomb itself weighed 1000 pounds, 400 of which was made up of explosive material, it was all packed into only a three-foot-long tube that had been corroded by time and encrusted with rock. Officials say that the area where the bomb was found is “well known for its World War II remains.”
“This was not a trivial operation,” said France’s Transport minister Philippe Tabarot. As if anyone on earth assumed that diffusing a 1,000-pound unexploded World War II bomb a mile and a half away from one of the busiest train stations in the world was so simple that a child could do it.
The bomb has been diffused and rail traffic has slowly ramped back up to pre-finding-of-a-huge-fucking-bomb levels.
