On Tuesday, A massive World War II bomb exploded during a delicate operation to defuse the five-tonne device in a channel near the Baltic Sea but no one was harmed, Polish officials said.
The 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 was discovered last year embedded at a depth of 12 metres (39 feet) with just its nose sticking out during dredging close to the port city of Swinoujscie in northwest Poland.
More than six metres long, it was laden with 2.4 tonnes of explosives equivalent to around 3.6 tons of TNT.
The navy had said earlier it had ruled out the traditional option of a controlled explosion for fear of destroying a bridge located some 500 metres away.
Instead, it had planned to use a technique known as deflagration to burn the explosive charge without causing a detonation, using a remotely controlled device to pierce through the shell to begin combustion.
But in the end the deflagration process turned into a detonation, said Grzegorz Lewandowski, spokesman for the Polish navy’s 8th Coastal Defence Flotilla based in Swinoujscie.
He said: “There had been no risk to the individuals directly involved, adding that the bomb can be considered neutralised.”
