February 2015 - I'm a bomb and about to blow up

After we knew that we wouldn't get a power connection in the near future, we were devastated. How could we start building a house without electricity at the construction site?

In retrospective I should have laughed this problem away.
Because it was such a tiny problem in comparison to what was coming next.


We got a letter from the city's council that informed us that there might be a bomb on our newly purchased property.
A bomb.
An English world war II bomb most likely.

The letter furthermore informed us that we are politely asked to take some action to remove the bomb as soon as possible.

That's bad news.

Finding our how much it costs to have a bomb removed was even worse news.
The removal itself is paid for by the government, but everything else (the digging, the evacuation of the neighbours, the underground construction, etc.) have to be paid for by the owner of the property ... us.

I can't even tell how devastated and helpless I felt. We didn't even begin the building process and already had to spent all our savings for a stupid bomb.
Thanks a lot ancestors for starting redundant wars for stupid reasons and having your land bombed.


(Edit: I know worse things happened during the war and my bomb is  chicken-feed compared to the serious stuff... but in my recent situation this old unexploded bomb was my private catastrophe.)


I called the warfare agent disposal and explained my problem.
The man on the phone was not impressed at all and told me that there hasn't necessarily to be an actual bomb.
I just got a warning because after checking old aerial photos there was a metallic shadow on the land which we purchased. "It might be everything. An old armor, an old car, a pile of metal or a pile of bodies.... or a bomb. The photos are old, so we have to doublecheck."

Oh great. As if the knowledge of a pile of dead bodies underneath my house would be anyhow comforting.

We set a date for the bomb investigation which would only include a bit of digging and some technical sensor magic.  The disposal technician just had to check if there was some kind of massive metal in the underground (like in a bomb) or if the shadow on the photo was just ... well a shadow.


Needless to say that I didn't sleep a lot until the date of the investigation.