More than 175 practice bombs from World War II have been found under a children’s playground in northern England, with concerns that more may remain, officials said.
The bombs were discovered as a construction project was underway to renovate the Scotts Park playground in Wooler, a small town in Northumberland, England, near the border with Scotland. Though they are practice bombs, which are used for training, they still carry a charge and can still be harmful. They were found with their fuses and contents intact.
Workers found a suspicious object on Jan. 14 while digging foundations at the site. A day after the first bomb was found, construction workers found a second one.
“It was almost exciting — crikey, we’ve found two!” said Mark Mather, a county councilor in Wooler. Local officials contacted a private bomb disposal company, Brimstone Site Investigations, to scour the site for what was supposed to be a two-day survey.
“But it soon became apparent that the scale of the problem was far greater than anyone had anticipated,” the parish council wrote.
On Jan. 23, the first day of Brimstone’s work, the company identified 65 more practice bombs, each weighing 10 pounds, as well as smoke cartridges.
On the second day, Brimstone found an additional 90 practice bombs and safely removed them to a designated storage area, the council said.
Though the bombs are practice bombs, “they do still carry a charge” and require removal by specialists, the parish council’s release said, adding, “These have been found with their fuse and contents still intact — and the detonator burster and smoke filling in particular can still be potentially hazardous.”
Mr. Mather said on Tuesday that about half of the park had been cleared, and that it was possible there were more bombs.
“It’s not something you normally expect when you develop in a play park,” Mr. Mather said. He said the work has been “painstakingly slow” because the park sits next to an old railway, and every time discarded scraps from the railway are found in the park, they must be investigated to ensure that they are not bombs.
Mr. Mather said that Wooler had been a training center for the Home Guard, a volunteer citizen militia considered the last line of defense against the Germans during World War II.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Defense said that officials visited the site twice in January and disposed of the first two bombs that were found. The ministry said in a statement that it supported the local authority and had advised it on the removal of any further ordnance.
The Wooler Parish Council said it hoped contractors could resume work in April once the site had been declared safe.
