The discovery of an aircraft bomb from World War II made the complete evacuation of a tertiary care hospital with 629 beds and 17 specialist departments including a neonatal intensive care unit necessary. Some months before an alarm plan had been issued and a fire practice had been carried out which made it obvious to all concerned how important such measures are. Nevertheless, more room for improvement could be learned from the evacuation, in particular the rapid classification of the patients into categories and the fact that 20-30% of the patients needed stretcher-based transport for evacuation.