Search for unexploded ammunition from WWII

At the end of September 2019, during the reconstruction of a road in Liberec, workers found an unexploded 100-kg aerial bomb. It was necessary to evacuate more than 6,500 people from its immediate vicinity so that bomb defusal experts could secure the bomb and transport it safely to a blasting pit in Ralsko, where the bomb was liquidated in a controlled manner. In the event of an explosion at the site of its finding, it could have injured humans up to a distance of one kilometre.

Together with experts from the Faculty of Mining and Geology of VŠB – Technical University of Ostrava, we act as investigator of the grant funded by the Ministry of the Interior. Its subject matter is to propose a methodology for detecting unexploded aerial bombs from World War II, namely using archive images obtained from Luftbilddatenbank Dr. Carls GmbH. Its output should be a historical orthophotomap that will show potential locations of unexploded ammunition and its approximate coordinates.

The images were taken by the Third Reich, but also by the Allies between 1939 and 1946, namely for the purposes of mapping and restoring topographic maps. The Allies used aerial reconnaissance mainly to find targets and then to verify the results of their bombing. From the data obtained it was found that up to 20 % of aerial ammunition that hit our territory did not explode. This unexploded ammunition represents a danger still today.