Workers clearing a collapsed bridge in Dresden, Germany, found a World War II-era British bomb, which an explosives team defused on-site Wednesday.

The Dresden Police Department said that the bomb, which had been discovered Tuesday, weighed over 550 pounds and that the device was equipped with a detonator.

The police did not specify the type of bomb it was.

Residents were ordered to evacuate an area about a kilometer in radius around the bomb site ahead of the defusal Wednesday. Around 17,000 people were affected by the order.

By 1:19 p.m. local time, the bomb squad removed the detonator from the bomb and the evacuation order was lifted, Dresden police said.

The eastern German city was pelted with thousands of tons of explosives by U.S. and U.K. bombers between Feb. 13 and Feb. 15, 1945, towards the end of World War II. Casualty estimates vary from 25,000 deaths to over 100,000.

The bombing inspired the novel “Slaughterhouse-Five,” whose author, Kurt Vonnegut, survived the attack as an American prisoner of war by hiding deep underground within a meat locker.

While Dresden authorities did not specify that the British bomb came from the famous February 1945 raid, it very likely did.

The city, which had limited military significance and was relatively far from allied airbases, had previously been the target only of two relatively small raids, both by U.S. planes.

In June, the western German city of Cologne saw over 20,000 people evacuated when three American bombs dropped during World War II were unearthed, according to the Associated Press. The explosives were successfully defused.

• Brad Matthews can be reached at bmatthews@washingtontimes.com.