Heaviest transported bunker to be moved to Czech museum

Most, North Bohemia, May 16 (CTK) - Two powerful cranes lifted a fifty-tonne military bunker from the Sverma coal mine Monday and a lorry will drive it to the Military Technical Museum in Lesany, central Bohemia, Oldrich Obermajer, from the Regional Military Transport Office, has told CTK.

No fortification from the interwar Czechoslovakia has been ever before moved to such a distance. It is also the heaviest transported military bunker, Obermajer said.

The weight of the bunker posed the biggest problem, he added.

"We are in the mine in which the subsoil is very soft. It was extremely difficult to lift the 50-tonne bunker without the cranes having crumbled," Obermajer said.

At first, the transport workers presumed the bunker would weigh about 30 tonnes, but it eventually turned out that the concrete colossus weighed over 50 tonnes, he added.

Two cranes loaded the bunker onto a lorry in an hour, Obermajer said.

Public transport along the road will not be closed over the drive anywhere, he added.

Light fortification bunkers were started to be built by Czechoslovakia in 1936. In all, some 800 of them were constructed. They made part of a defence line against Nazi Germany.

The light fortification of the 36 type consisted of a firing room manned by two to six soldiers. It was armed with machine guns of the 26 type or submachine guns of the 24 type.

Most of them were situated in the borderland ceded by Czechoslovakia to Germany after the Munich agreement in 1938. The fortifications were never used in combat.