Ordnance Disposal Service Lower Saxony

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The Lower Saxony Ordnance Disposal Service (KBD) is a facility of the State of Lower Saxony for the disposal of munitions in the civilian sector through the recovery, defusing , transport and destruction of ordnance from the First and Second World Wars .

description

The Lower Saxony ordnance disposal service has 44 employees (as of 2017), 22 of whom work in the field. Among them are seven demolition masters . Locations exist in Hanover , Munster and Achternholt . The facility takes on an average of 1000 missions every year, during which an average of 100 tons of ordnance are recovered, defused, blown up or disposed of. In 2017, for example, there were 725 missions and around 130 tons of ammunition. In the North Sea, there are more and more ammunition finds due to the construction of offshore wind farms .

A special area of ​​activity of the ordnance disposal service since 1973 has been the search for bombs dud by analyzing Allied aerial photographs from the time of the Second World War. Around 130,000 aerial photographs are used, which are currently (2018) being digitized. The targeted analysis of aerial photographs is mainly used for building applications , of which the KBD processes an average of 2500 per year. The affiliation of the KBD 2012 to the State Office for Geoinformation and Land Surveying Lower Saxony also took place against the background of using the existing expertise in aerial photographs.

history

The ordnance disposal service was founded on March 11, 1948 in Hanover as a bomb clearance command for the state of Lower Saxony by order of the Lower Saxony Ministry of the Interior . Before that, munitions disposal in Lower Saxony, which belonged to the British occupation zone , was carried out by or under the supervision of the British Army of the Rhine . There were urban bomb clearance squads in Hanover, Osnabrück and Oldenburg.

Since it was founded in 1948, the facility has been reorganized and renamed several times. In 1958 the name was changed to ammunition clearing group and in 1974 to ordnance disposal service, which was affiliated with the Hanover police department . From 1994 until the dissolution of the district governments in Lower Saxony in 2004, the KBD belonged to the district government of Hanover as Department 505 . Afterwards he was part of the Central Police Directorate in Hanover. In 2012, the ordnance disposal service was spun off from the Lower Saxony Police and assigned as a department to the State Office for Geoinformation and State Surveying of Lower Saxony.

Since its establishment in 1948, the ordnance disposal service has cleared and rendered harmless around 35,000 tons of ordnance, including at least 14,000 bombs. Nine employees were killed and several seriously injured. The most serious accident occurred on June 1, 2010 in Göttingen during the uncontrolled detonation of a dud bomb with a long detonator . Three employees were killed and others injured.

The ordnance disposal service carried out a bomb clearance with one of the largest evacuations in Germany on May 7, 2017 in Hanover, when around 50,000 people had to leave their houses and apartments. Three duds were defused.

literature

  • Wolfgang Thamm: Lower Saxony in: 55 years of ordnance disposal in the Federal Republic of Germany. 1945-2000 , Bissendorf 2002, pp. 161-186.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The ordnance disposal service turns 70. The ticking danger in the ground in the district newspaper on June 11, 2018
  2. ↑ Experts defuse 130 tons of ordnance at ndr.de on April 12, 2018
  3. ↑ Ordnance disposal service changes to the regional directorate Hanover of the LGLN
  4. ^ Three employees of the Hanover police in Göttingen fatally injured in the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung of June 2, 2010
  5. ↑ Three deaths in bomb disposal in Göttingen at ndr.de on June 1, 2010
  6. ↑ Hanover's biggest bomb clearance ever at ndr.de on November 9, 2017