RTL presenter Roberta Bieling (49) received the disturbing news at the beginning of the live broadcast of her magazine “Point 12”: After a 500 kilogram bomb from the Second World War was discovered during dredging work in the nearby Rhine on the morning of Wednesday (April 3rd). was discovered, RTL’s broadcasting center in Cologne-Deutz had to be evacuated under time pressure. The experienced TV woman took it calmly, briefly informed her audience of the surprising inconvenience in a clip (“It’s going to be a somewhat turbulent ‘Point 12’ broadcast today”) and then left the studio with her team.
Under the motto “We keep sending!” They quickly moved the TV studio to the terrace of the “Park Café” in Cologne’s nearby Rheinpark and put on an improvised program there. Given the unclear situation, it was not yet possible to predict how the day’s planned broadcasting would continue. In the event that normal operation would still not be possible in the broadcast center by the time the news program “RTL aktuell” began at 6:45 p.m., an emergency plan was developed to have the news format moderated live from Berlin by Jan Hofer (74).
According to a report in “Bild”, Hofer’s spontaneous intervention was no longer necessary. After the city of Cologne announced that the bomb had been defused at 4:06 p.m., the RTL staff could finally breathe a sigh of relief and return to work. According to the official all-clear from the authorities, it was a “demanding and unusual operation”.
Presenter Roberta Bieling took the exciting evacuation campaign with a good dose of humor in a statement reported by RTL: “In our editorial team, everyone always has fun when such special situations happen. Then you notice, like everyone else, even in the studio, that it’s special again Step on the gas. That’s why it was clear to me all along that everything would work out great anyway. And I just like it when things happen differently than usual.”
