Plymouth bomb: How will disposal of WWII explosive work – and is there a risk it could explode?
More than 3,000 people have left their homes after an unexploded Second World War bomb was found in the back garden of a home in Plymouth.
Devon and Cornwall Police declared a major incident on Tuesday and evacuated properties within 200 metres of the bomb, extending it to 309 metres on Thursday.
Plymouth Council has confirmed bomb disposal experts from the army and navy plan to dispose of the bomb today – but how will they do it?
Here’s everything we know about the bomb and what’s being done to remove it – plus expertise from a bomb disposal expert.
What do we know about the bomb?
The bomb, which can also be referred to as an unexploded ordnance (UO), is a 500kg (1,102lb) German bomb from the Second World War, a Ministry of Defence (MoD) spokesperson has said.
The MoD identified it as a SC500 transverse fuzed airdrop weapon which, according to the Luftwaffe Resource Centre’s website, was a “general demolition bomb”.
Pic: FPS Images
It’s the same type of bomb that was found off the north coast of Guernsey in July 2023 by a local diver. The Royal Navy carried out a controlled explosion on the Guernsey bomb within an hour of specialist divers going to see it for the first time.
Andy Abbott, who spent 25 years in the Army Reserve’s bomb unit, told Sky News it was one of the biggest types of bombs the Germans dropped during the war that still get found today.
Where is the bomb and how was it found?
Officers were first called to a property on St Michael Avenue in Keyham on Tuesday, after a man reported finding the device while digging out the foundations for an extension in the garden.
Speaking to Plymouth Live, the man who called police said he actually found it “about a week ago”.
Map shows the area where a cordon is in place
He said he “hit something with a spade, but we weren’t sure what it was at first”.
He said rain over the next few days made the object increasingly visible.
The man called the police on Tuesday and sent them photos.
“Five minutes later there’s a knock on the door and police officers asking to have a look,” he said. “The next minute they’re suggesting a cordon.”
Mr Abbott said bombs such as this one are usually found in big fields or in docks rather than more confined places such as the Keyham garden.
Who is dealing with it? And could it explode?
It was Devon and Cornwall Police who first came to the scene, but since then there has been the Royal Navy’s bomb disposal unit, military personnel and service members of various search and rescue teams, including from the local fire brigade.
Plymouth Council said the bomb would be removed and transported by military convoy through the city for disposal at sea.
In a statement, the council said the bomb disposal experts considered a controlled detonation on site, but ultimately decided “the safest and least impactful option is to remove the device from St Michael Avenue and travel to the Torpoint Ferry slipway – for the bomb to be disposed of at sea (beyond the Breakwater)”.
“Highly trained bomb disposal experts will carefully remove the device from the property and it will be transported by road in a military convoy, west along Parkside and Royal Navy Avenue, joining at the junction on Saltash Road to continue south joining Albert Road, turning right along Park Avenue and heading down Ferry Road to the Torpoint Ferry terminal,” the statement said.
Mr Abbott says “the best option is to always blow it up in situ”, but added the squad would have weighed up the damage that could be done to nearby houses and infrastructure.
When it comes to moving it “there is a risk, but it’s a minimal risk,” he added. “They wouldn’t be going with this process if they hadn’t weighed up the odds and found that it was pretty safe. But it is a big one, and there’s obviously always a slight risk.”
Explaining the process, he said: “They’ll probably lift the bomb onto the back of a truck, most likely with a crane.
“You protect it as much as you can on the back of the truck, probably by burying it in loads of sandbags, then they’ll gradually move it with a police cordon in place down to the sea.”
Images on Thursday showed tonnes of sand being delivered to the area, which a police source told Plymouth Live would be used to build a sand wall around the unexploded bomb.
Mr Abbott said sand and water bags are often used to mitigate for the bomb going off and that the bomb squad would have weighed up detonating the bomb on site, using them to contain the explosion.
“But you’re probably going to be blowing up four or five houses at least,” he said. “Even if you try and mitigate the explosion, the damage to those properties… they would be knocked down.”
Royal Naval Bomb Disposal experts dug around the explosive and used a special device to assess it.
A team of 200 volunteers from some of the organisations mentioned above have been visiting houses in the Keyham area, checking that the necessary homes have been evacuated and offering information to local residents.
Why not just diffuse it?
Mr Abbott says that while a fuse as old as the ones in a WW2 bomb are unlikely to be dangerous, there is a type of explosive acid often built into them which may cause problems while trying to diffuse it.
“Obviously the device is very old now. The fusion system they used on these were two fuses that transverse in the bomb itself,” he explained.
“So you’d have to mitigate the fusing. And by now, after this time, the fuses would be quite safe. The only issue you might have is sometimes these things were filled with picric acid, so you’d have picric crystals that can form after leaking and that is dangerous.
“So if you try and remove the fuse or take the fuse out that way, that could have the same effect as the fuse actually working. So you need to mitigate the risk of that too.”
How many people have been evacuated and when can they go back?
The cordon has meant 1,219 properties have been affected and an estimated 3,250 people have had to leave the area this week, with residents encouraged to stay with friends and family.
Those who have been evacuated have only been allowed to return to their homes to collect “urgent, essential items only” including medication or a pet, the council added.
But now residents of the Devon city living within 300 metres of the convoy route will need to completely evacuate their home between the hours of 2pm and 5pm this afternoon.
The council said it would “aim to keep residents informed throughout the operation” and that it would announce when roads are being reopened on its website and on social media.
Plymouth’s Life Centre has been set up as an emergency rest centre with tea and coffee, blankets, towels and toothbrushes, a creche and faith room available.
A similar incident to this one occurred in Plymouth in 2011, when an explosive device was unearthed by a workman at a building in Notte Street, near the city’s Hoe.
The device was made safe before it was moved to the seabed off Plymouth Sound, with an exclusion zone around it.
Plymouth saw more than 50 bombing attacks during the Second World War.
The government at one point considered using Iraq to process asylum seekers – like the Rwanda scheme – according to documents seen by Sky News.
This could have seen people sent from the UK to a country the government advises against all travel to.
The two countries already have a returns agreement – but only for people that are from Iraq.
Politics live: Follow the latest updates here
According to leaked correspondence between high-ranking officials, the Iraqi returns commitments were made with a “request for discretion” and no publicity.
The country was willing to move forward but did not want a formal or public agreement.
The current travel advice to Iraq on the Foreign Office website simply advises against “all travel to parts of Iraq”. However, according to the document, negotiations were fairly advanced and described in one table as “good recent progress with Iraq”.
Other government aims included enhancing cooperation with the Iranian Embassy in order to enhance returns arrangements for migrants and potential asylum seekers.
Returns agreements are also in the works for Eritrea and Ethiopia, according to documents about work undertaken by the Home Office and Foreign Office that relates to countries with the highest number of nationals arriving to the UK by small boats.
In a tranche of internal government documents seen by Sky News, even from the earliest stage of the Rwanda policy, Downing Street advisers knew there were serious problems with their proposals.
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First Rwanda relocation raids carried out
There are even private admissions that many people arriving here on small boats did so without the assistance of criminal gangs – despite their communications strategy.
Comparisons were also made to Australia’s response – to what Downing Street officials understood to be a comparable “smaller problem” than in the UK and admitted it had cost billions of Australian dollars in order for their returns processes to be fully operational.
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In one document submitted to the Home Office, some of the highest-ranking officials at the time wrote that their guidance was to be “prepared to pay over the odds” to get the policy up and running. And that the initial offer from Rwanda was a “modest sum”.
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
Whitehall’s official spending watchdog has priced the cost of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda at £1.8m per person for the first 300 people the government deports to Kigali.
It also disclosed that since April 2022 the Home Office has paid £220m into Rwanda’s economic transformation and integration fund, which is designed to support economic growth in Rwanda, and will continue to make payments to cover asylum processing and operational costs for individuals relocated to Rwanda.
It will also pay further amounts of £50m over the next year and an additional £50m the following year.
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A government source said: “The Home Office is spending millions every day accommodating migrants in hotels – that’s not right or fair. We’re taking action to put an end to this costly and dangerous cycle. Doing nothing is not a free option – we must act if we want to stop the boats and save lives.
“The UK is continuing to work with a range of international partners to tackle global illegal migration challenges. Our Rwanda partnership is a pioneering response to the global challenge of illegal migration, and we will get flights off the ground to Rwanda in the next nine to eleven weeks.”
“The moment you have it yourself you hear it everywhere, but for something so prevalent it’s not talked about at all,” says Patrick Keane. His right arm is plugged into a tube that runs up to a bag of clear liquid in a treatment room at the Royal Free Hospital in north London, one of the UK’s largest cancer treatment centres.
The 56-year-old’s future is dependent on the slow drip of chemicals that attack the cancer cells in his body. If the tumour in his bowel can be reduced by chemotherapy, it can then be more easily surgically removed.
Returning to duties last week after his own diagnosis, the King chose to highlight innovations in cancer research and the thousands who like him are living under the shadow of the disease.
Patrick is one. Indeed, he got his cancer diagnosis in late January, around the same time as the King, and he is taking part in an innovative clinical trial that may help future patients.
Patrick Keane is taking part in an innovative clinical trial that may help future patients
In this election year, charities are calling on political parties to produce long-term plans for tackling the disease as part of their manifesto pledges. While innovation is saving lives, there is a looming budget shortfall.
Cancer Research UK, to whom the King became patron last week, estimates there will be a £1bn gap in research funding within the next decade. This is in part due to inflation combined with the cost of living crisis impacting donations to cancer charities.
Add to this that the number of us getting cancer is increasing, projected to go up by a fifth by 2040.
The Royal Free London NHS Trust, which receives the highest number of cancer referrals in London at 50,000 a year, has seen a 10,000 increase in referrals since 2019.
It’s no surprise then that the NHS is missing targets for waiting times between urgent GP referrals and treatment.
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One in two of us will get cancer and, as Patrick knows too well, that word opens up a world of uncertainty. “The word carries so much baggage with it,” he says, and having it can send your mind to “some pretty dark places”.
He talks frankly about the treatment and its side effects, which after his first two rounds, have been minimal. “I didn’t have much of a head of hair to begin with,” he jokes.
Some of his hair has gone in patches, but asked what the hardest thing has been, he doesn’t hesitate: “My father passed away when I was 14. He died of cancer. I have 13-year-old twins so I couldn’t initially shift the thought – is this going to happen again? Passing 48, the age that my father died was a key milestone for me. My children being older than I was when my father passed away was another one.
“Nobody expects their dad to die. It’s a very unreal concept, and I’m not dying – but to try to have that conversation you know – ‘things will be fine.’ It’s very treatable.”
Two weeks after his third round of chemo, scans show the treatment has done its job, Patrick’s surgery can go ahead and is due to happen later this month.
Roopinder Gillmore, lead cancer physician at the Royal Free
More survive cancer as technology advances
Cancer is more treatable now. More of us are surviving it because technology is advancing.
At the Royal Free that ranges from a new cutting-edge £8m PET scanner, which offers a faster more accurate diagnosis, to new drugs offering greater survival chances.
Lead cancer physician at the Royal Free, Roopinder Gillmore, told Sky News: “We are doing surgery quicker, more keyhole robotic surgery in this hospital. We do liver transplants for patients with primary liver cancer, we’re trialling that out in other cancer types which is really exciting.
“We are doing more specialised radiotherapy and for me, my thing is drug treatments, and they are exponentially increasing in terms of what we can offer our patients. The big thing is immunotherapy, we didn’t have that 15 years ago. It has completely changed the outlook for people with lung cancer and skin cancer.”
Backlogs and waiting times have increased
But for all the advances, backlogs and waiting times have built up since the pandemic. The latest NHS figures show 64% of patients received their first treatment within 62 days of an urgent GP referral. The target is 85%.
That stretch on resources has a knock-on impact on patients like 29-year-old Beaux Harris.
Beaux, an actor and dancer who teaches at The Manor Dance Studio in north London, has what is called a mutated BRCA1 gene, which means her chances of getting cancer dramatically increase in her 30s.
She has a 60% chance of getting ovarian cancer and a 90% chance of getting breast cancer.
So she has decided to get a preventative double mastectomy and a hysterectomy but, due to the backlog, she has a long wait.
Beaux Harris has a mutated gene which means her chances of getting cancer dramatically increase in her 30s
‘I feel like I’ve got a ticking time bomb on me’
She says: “I feel like I’ve got a ticking time bomb on me – and it is terrifying. The truth is it doesn’t really feel like a choice when you are presented with a figure like that – it’s like saying would you get on a plane with a 90% chance of it crashing? I know I wouldn’t.”
She has been told that waiting times on the NHS for her preventative treatment is two years at the earliest.
She says people on her online support groups have waited five years. She’s also been told there’s a high chance the operation could be cancelled at the last minute if a high-demand cancer patient needs the slot.
“I could get timed out,” she says. So, she is crowdfunding to get the £50,000 plus she needs to go private.
‘I would love to be worrying about things that every other 29-year-old is worrying about’
She might need more funds if she wants some sort of normality at the end of it.
She says: “If I have a hysterectomy now, I can’t have children. So, I’m also trying to raise money to freeze my eggs. Something that is offered on the NHS to cancer patients, but not to BRCA patients.”
She certainly doesn’t want to wait until she gets cancer. Ovarian cancer is known as the silent killer due to the difficulty in early detection.
Beaux’s grandmother, her mother, and her aunt all died of cancer because of the BRCA1 mutated gene, she hopes to be the first female in her family in generations to survive having it.
“I would love to be worrying about things that every other 29-year-old is worrying about,” she says. “I’ve got some bloody Olivia awards to win!”
Indeed, Beaux is using her talents putting on performances and doing tap dance sessions to raise money for her treatment.
In some ways it is taken for granted that, because it touches so many of us, most of the money raised for cancer research in this country comes from the British public, but charities say the government needs to play a bigger role in ensuring the UK continues to innovate and improve treatment for what remains the defining health issue of our time.
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