Sad news indeed.
Not only because I know one of the guys (Kassel is just 20 k away, and while in Hessia the only city in the middle of nowhere where everybody from 50 km around hangs out at weekends), but also because as it appears we are talking a real accident here:
EOD teams in Germany practically for every new construction/excavation (in the bombarded areas of WWII) have to swing into action because of the high number of duds that are still buried in the soil, some 60+ years later. Just the sheer numbers of WWII ordnance disarmed every year makes you cringe:
- Around 15.000 WWII bombs of 250 - 3.000 kgs get disarmed every year, so far without only 3 incidents (none fatal) over 50 years, the majority of ordnance being of the 1.000 or 2.000 kind
- because of having become a "regular" act the task got transferred from the Armed Forces "Kampfmittelräumdienst" (= EOD) to civil teams that are well trained but treat them as a daily job w/o problems (they do not even wear protective gears, after all, it is "just" screwing out the detonator)
- The killed (civil) team had itself disarmed more than 700 WWII bombs in the last 2 years
- the total of WWII duds still active and buried just in the region of NRW is estimated to be around 100.000 devices (of 700.000 tons released), the teams have 330.000 photos of probable dud locations in their database.
- The total of yet unearthed unexploded ordnance of WWII in Germany is estimated to sum up to around 4.000.000 devices, the majority being in the low weight area. Of the heavies (1000 kg upwards) the estimation judges that there are a total of 300.000 devices in the ground waiting to corrode to explosion, the latter being the main problem: Corrosion makes the bombs touch sensible, every year further they get more instabile.
For more details on this often underestimated dily effort in Germany, read the following (crudely trnslated) article on the NRW province (any film maker want to jump on it? ):
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=es&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wdr.de%2Fthemen%2Fpanorama%2Funfall07%2Fkampfmittel_beseitigung%2Findex.jhtml%3FstdComments%3D1Rattler
