Train services from Paris will gradually resume and roads will reopen later Friday after the disposal operation of an unexploded World War II bomb caused transportation chaos in the French capital, including the suspension of high-speed train links with London and Brussels.
Transport Minister Philippe Tabarot said that a total almost 500 trains were canceled and the disruption affected around 600,000 people at the Gare du Nord, France’s busiest train station. It wasn’t immediately clear how the bomb was made safe or disposed of.
“We’re delighted and relieved that all this has come to an end,” he said, adding that a major highway was immediately reopened after having been closed for several hours. Train services were scheduled to resume from 6pm local time (1700 GMT).
Rail services were halted at Gare du Nord, upending commuters’ workdays and travellers’ weekend getaway plans, as bomb-disposal experts worked to make the half-ton explosive device safe.
The cascade of transportation woes first hit morning rush-hour train services before also spreading to the road network, with Paris police closing the A1 highway that feeds into the north of the city, as well as sections of the capital’s always-busy ring road, as the bomb-disposal operation dragged on.
Eurostar, operator of sleek high-speed trains through the Channel Tunnel that joins England with the European continent, announced the cancellation of all its services linking its Paris hub at Gare du Nord to the UK and Belgian capitals. Scores of commuter, regional and high-speed trains between Paris and towns and cities in northern France were also cancelled.
Stranded travelers
At Eurostar’s hub in London, St. Pancras International station, passengers scrambled for alternatives. Fridays are invariably busy with thousands of weekend travelers. Paris-bound passengers were advised to try taking trains to Lille in northern France, or fly.
Eurostar said it “sincerely apologizes for the disruption and understands the inconvenience this may cause."
Workers laboring overnight on a bridge-replacement project spotted the half-ton bomb before dawn Friday, after it was found by an earth-moving machine at a depth of about 2 meters (six feet), between train tracks to the north of the Gare du Nord station, in the Seine-Saint Denis region that borders northern Paris, the national rail operator SNCF said.
Bomb disposal services arrived within the hour and set up a 200-metre security perimeter, later extended to 500 metres. Tabarot said that 300 police officers worked to secure the area.
“This was no small operation,” Tabarot said.
The Gare du Nord habitually hosts 700,000 travelers per day, making it the busiest rail hub in both France and Europe, the SNCF says. As well as towns and cities across northern France and the Paris suburbs, the station also serves Paris’s main airport and international destinations, including London, Brussels and cities in the Netherlands.
'Probably either a British or American bomb'
Bombs left over from the battles fought in France and its skies in both world wars are regularly unearthed, even more than a century later, although it's rare that they cause such widespread disruption in people-packed Paris.
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“It is probably a British or an American bomb dropped in spring 1944 during the pre-D-Day Allied air offensive against French railways carried out in order to slow the possible arrival of German reinforcements at the Normandy beaches,” Andrew Knapp, a British historian specialised in WWII bombings in France, told FRANCE 24.
He added that it could have been from “the night of April 18-19, 1944, when the Royal Air Force attacked the marshalling yards (triage) at nearby La Chapelle, dropping 1,265 tons of bombs. An estimated 13.5 percent of the bombs hit the target (this level of accuracy was quite good for a precise target). The other 86.5 percent went all over the place – some of them nearly destroyed Sacré Coeur.”
"But there were a lot of raids around that time ... It could even have been a German bomb from June 1940 or August 1944, but the Germans dropped far fewer bombs on France than the Allies did."
In World War II, Allied forces' bombing raids flattened towns and cities in the Normandy region northwest of Paris but didn't wreak destruction on the same scale on the French capital. Still, factories, train lines and other targets in and around Paris were bombed repeatedly, killing more than 3,600 people and wounding thousands more, according to city archives.
The French interior ministry says that since World War II's end in 1945, disposal teams have defused 700,000 air-dropped bombs and made safe nearly 50 million mines, shells and other explosive devices.
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(FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP)
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