Wildfires burning across Europe are setting off old WWI and WWII bombs

Members of a bomb disposal unit sit next to 1.8 ton World War II bomb after defusing it in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2017 (Picture: AP) Emergency crews battling wildfires across Europe have exposed a potentially deadly threat lurking beneath the scorched surface – rusty old wartime bombs and mines. The intense heat has already set off explosions in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, where a bomb-disposal team was dispatched to check a forest threatened by flames near a site of fierce fighting in the Limburg province in 1944. Sarah Njeri, a peace and conflict scholar at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, said: ‘Climate change is now doing the work of unburying and reactivating what was previously stable.’ She said the fires, along with the WWI and WWII bombs being deto