WARSAW – Polish military divers are due to begin a delicate operation on Monday to defuse a massive World War II bomb at the bottom of a channel near the Baltic Sea.
The five-ton device – nicknamed “Tallboy” and also known as an “earthquake bomb” – was dropped by the Royal Air Force in an attack on a Nazi warship in 1945.
“It’s a world first. Nobody has ever defused a Tallboy that is so well preserved and underwater,” Grzegorz Lewandowski, spokesman for the Polish Navy’s 8th Coastal Defence Flotilla, told AFP.
Around 750 local residents are being evacuated from an area of 2.5 kilometers around the bomb and the operation is expected to last up to five days. (AFP)
