On Tuesday 26 November, the Army bomb disposal experts of the 2nd Piacenza bridge engineer regiment neutralised an aircraft bomb found inside a construction site by the personnel of a company specialising in systematic clearance for the identification of war devices, in the locality of “Capannella sul Fiora" a short distance from the SR 74 “Maremmana" in the municipality of Pitigliano (GR). The operation was coordinated by the Grosseto prefecture and the command North Operating Forces of Padua.
The device found is an aerial bomb weighing 535 pounds (approximately 240 kg) containing approximately 124 kg of high explosive, with two activation devices (fuses), one of which was not safe, and which had not exploded since the Second World War.
Precisely because of the sensitivity of the type of intervention, on the instructions of the soldiers of the 2nd bridge regiment, an evacuation of the population was carried out in the affected area within a radius of 821 meters (the so-called "red zone") from the point where the device was found. Furthermore, the municipal and private roads were closed in the sections that fell within the evacuation area.
Army specialists went into action at 09:00, with the first phase, the most delicate: that of removing the activation devices. It was a series of operations that the bomb disposal experts carried out at a safe distance and that made the device less dangerous. Following this, the second phase saw the transport of the device to the "Albanesi" quarry in the neighboring municipality of Manciano for final destruction.
This was the second intervention by the Piacenza bomb disposal experts on a bomb found in the same construction site in the space of four months. Since the beginning of the year, over 250 interventions on war devices of all types have been carried out in the 13 provinces (Piacenza, Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Massa-Carrara, Pisa, Lucca, Pistoia, Grosseto, Livorno, Arezzo, Prato and Siena) under the jurisdiction of the 2nd Pontieri Engineer Regiment.
The Army contributes daily to the security of the country. Thanks to the technical skills of highly specialized personnel, it is possible to both carry out these interventions in total safety and intervene at any time, throughout the Italian territory to support the national community in the event of public disasters.
