Some residents who live in the city of Exeter in Southwest England last week had a fleeting experience of the horrors of the second World War when they had to be evacuated from their homes and the university campus, so a bomb could be safely detonated.

According to the BBC, the 80-year-olb bomb was discovered by builders on private land adjacent to the University of Exeter’s Streatham campus, leading to the evacuation of about 1,400 students. Also evacuated were residents living within 100metres of the bomb location, as a massive joint operation between the police, the army and other security agencies kicked in to detonate the 1,000kilogramme bomb without any loss of live and massive damage to property.

“This is the moment an unexploded World War 2 bomb was detonated in Exeter last night,” said the Devon & Cornwall and Dorset Police Drone Team on their update on Facebook. “Our team have spent the last two days supporting the huge multi-agency operation after a WW2 bomb was discovered near University of Exeter on Friday. Thousands of houses were evacuated and this video shows the destructive power that this 80-year-old bomb still had.”

Suspected to have fallen from a Nazi bomber in 1942, the 2,5m long bomb was destroyed by bomb disposal teams in a 400tonne sand ‘box’, in an explosion that had shrapnel smashing nearby windows and was felt eight kilometres away.

Before the blast, police evacuated residents with a 400m radius of the bomb’s location, which was reduced to 100m after the bomb was detonated on the evening of February 27.

Just in October last year, another WWII bomb – the Tallboy or ‘earthquake’ bomb – exploded during an attempt to detonate it in Poland. Nobody was harmed from the explosion. The bomb – said to have been dropped by the Royal Armed Forced during a raid that sank a German cruiser – had sank to the bottom of a Baltic Sea shipping canal

About 750 residents near the port city of Swinoujscie were evacuated before detonation was attempted.