Hard to believe though that 70,00 people would need to evacuate.
It just seems impossible.
A Mark 82, or 500 pound bomb has a killing radius of 80 meters or nearly a football field and that would most definitely be a danger close mission were you just outside that area. If they are really uncertain about the bomb, a block may be reasonable. I wouldn’t want to be within a block of a 500 pounder, and I was 200 meters away once, if I didn’t have to be. Much too close.
I do not know what size bombs we dropped on Germany but I do know the Germans had 1000kg they dropped on GB. That would be over one ton. If they had it we likely had something similar. I know when we dropped 1000 pounders, you could not be in the grid square.
50,000 in Hanover last spring, and 45,000 in Koblenz (half the town) back in 2011, 20,000 in Cologne in 2015. The numbers aren’t that unusual, depending on the size of the bomb and the the density of the housing.
At least they aren’t as nasty as some of the World War I stuff in Belgium and northeast France.