You're not bulletproof...

Boom… Defusing leftover bombs from World War II hidden in the ground beneath German cities has long been routine. The area surrounding the dud is evacuated, experts arrive to defuse the explosive and before long, normality returns. Often, such operations hardly even warrant a mention in the back pages of local newspapers. That, however, was not the situation in Munich on Tuesday night. Unable to defuse a 250 kilogram (550 pound) bomb found buried one meter (three feet) deep at the site of the former bar Schwabinger 7 in the heart of the Bavarian capital, authorities elected to detonate the explosive on site. The controlled blast, finally carried out just before 10 p.m., sent a fireball into the night sky, shattered windows in the vicinity and resulted in several small fires on surrounding rooftops. Nobody was hurt. “Almost all the window panes in the immediate area were destroyed,” Diethard Posorski, from the Munich bomb disposal authority, told journalists. A fire department spokesman added: “It looked quite spectacular.” Ahead of the detonation, some 2,500 people in the streets surrounding the site were evacuated and dozens of cars were removed, accounting for repeated delays. Several streets were closed, including the busy arterial Leopoldstrasse and parts of the ring road around the city center, as were a trio of subway stops. Further afield, thousands more residents were asked to stay inside. The explosion was heard across the city. Clumps of hay, from the bales authorities stacked around the site in an effort to reduce the explosive concussion, caught fire in the blast and drifted onto surrounding rooftops. The blazes were quickly extinguished and damage was minor, the fire department said. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/bomb-from-world-war-ii-detonated-in-munich-a-852669.html

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