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More than a thousand people were evacuated from an area in northern England today so a bomb squad could detonated a 500-pound bomb left over from World War II. Anchor Lisa Mullins finds out more from reporter Jill McKenzie, who was there for the controlled detonation.

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LISA MULLINS: Today a bomb – a very big bomb left over from the Second World War – exploded in Northern England.

SOUND CLIP: [EXPLOSION] Ooooohhhh.

MULLINS: It was a controlled explosion done by a trained bomb squad in a field in Yorkshire. Jill McKenzie is a reporter with BBC Radio York and she was there as that bomb was detonated. Jill first off, how did a World War II bomb every end up in a field in Yorkshire?

JILL MCKENZIE: Well it crashed. It was on an airplane, a Whitley bomber, which crashed in 1940 in October. And I’ve actually spoken to some people in the village who remember the night the plane came down. They went down to the filed. This isn’t a very big village. Only a few hundred people. So they went down to the field to see what was going on and spoke to some of the soldiers there who [INAUDIBLE] said look this plane’s come down. And the bomb was left over from that.

MULLINS: But the plane had come in from where? I mean why was it carrying this enormous bomb?

MCKENZIE: Well it had been over to Germany on a bombing raid. We don’t know why the plane still had a bomb on board. It had been to Germany. It was on its way back heading for a nearby airfield. It’s possible that they tried to jettison it and it got stuck and then when the plane crashed it just landed in the field with it and it was never found until this weekend.

MULLINS: Why were they looking now?

MCKENZIE: Well interestingly this field has been plowed several times since, you know every year since the plane came down. And during the course of the plowings people had found bits of plane. They’d found bits of engine, bits alloy. But they never unearthed this bomb. Now this weekend an amateur historian got permission from the Royal Air Force to dig around in the field and try and get some bits of plane for a local museum. He got a little bit more than he bargained for. He took a digger in there, dug down, and then up came this 500-pound World War II bomb.

MULLINS: Up it came and good thing it didn’t explode at that point or up he would have went. What’s the reason at that point that it hadn’t exploded? And why did they say it hadn’t exploded anyway until today’s detonation?

MCKENZIE: Well it hadn’t exploded. It was still live. So of course the first thing he did was call the police who called in the bomb disposal squad. And they actually left the bomb where it was, in the bucket of this digger. They spent Monday deciding exactly what to do with it and then once they’d decided, they decided that they needed to set up a one-mile exclusion zone. So actually needed to clear a huge area. They had to evacuate two entire villages – around about 1000 people all together. Some just went to friend’s houses. Some went to a village hole, a couple of villages down the road and some went up to the hill opposite the field to see the explosion for themselves.

MULLINS: And where were you yourself Jill?

MCKENZIE: I was with the people on the hill. I wanted to see this explosion. And I have to say it was spectacular. It was a huge brown cloud. There was some sand in there because they had piled sandbags on top of the bomb to contain the blast as much as possible. There were 100 one-ton sandbags there – all of them bright blue – so it was really showing up in this green and yellow field. And as soon as the bomb went off you could see this explosion. This huge plume of smoke. And then just a couple of seconds of later this enormous bang and the gasps from the crowd were incredible. It was quite exciting.

MULLINS: Could you feel it?

MCKENZIE: No I couldn’t from where I was because we were about a mile away. But I spoke to a lady who was watching it in a car and she said the car shook.

MULLINS: And she was pretty close I guess.

MCKENZIE: Well no she was about a mile away as well on this hillside so there must have been a fair old aftershock.

MULLINS: What was the area like where the bomb was detonated today after it was indeed exploded?

MCKENZIE: Well we did go down to have a look, and as I said before, there’d been a pile of sandbags. What was left was a few sandbags. There was this huge crater in the middle with a few bits of metal sticking out. Still hot to the touch an hour after in had gone off. And there were just a few piles of sand. There were bits of sandbag and sand strewn all over the field so the blast had gone quite far.

MULLINS: But presumably they had to also explode the digger, the mechanism that pulled it out from the earth.

MCKENZIE: Well fortunately for the digger owner they’d managed to disconnect the digger from the actual bucket so it was just the arm of digger and the bucket that was left holding the bomb. So the rest of the digger got out. So I think the owner was quite relieved about that.

MULLINS: Jill McKenzie is a reporter with BBC Radio York speaking to us from Ebberston, one of the villages that was evacuated today so a World War II era bomb could be detonated. Thank you Jill.

MCKENZIE: Thank you.

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