Berlin's Tegel Airport Finally Cleaning up bombs from WWII

German officials have announced plans to clear Berlin's Tegel Airport of all remaining WWII bombs and explosives. The announcement comes a mere 63 years, 7 months, and 23 days after Germany's formal surrender to the Allied Forces.

There are so many explosives - bombs and grenades - that litter the ground around Tegel Airport that more than 500 sites will be excavated to finally make it safe for passenger jets if they stray off the tarmac.

Berlin's Senator for Urban Development, Ingeborg Junge-Reyer declined to comment on the threat posed by the deadly relics.

All told, around 2.7 million tons of explosives were dropped on Germany during WWII. While it is inevitable that some of those explosives remain in the ground, do you think at some point they might have checked heavily trafficked, publicly-used areas like airports? What was their contingency plan if a passenger plane skidded off the runway, a-la the Fedex flight in Lubbock today?

We could have written something into the Marshall Plan about dropping bomb-sniffing dogs before the planes passed over the wall into East Berlin, but I guess there was an assumption that German efficiency would naturally address unstable explosives strewn around commercial runways. Apparently, however, they were too busy conquering the automotive industry to engineer a few metal detectors.