Milwaukees Best Light said:
fc2112 said:
Hard to believe that - almost 110 years after the conclusion of World War I - there are still places in France you cannot go due to lethal chemicals and unexploded ordinances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge
Quote:
Zone rouge (French for 'Red Zone') is a chain of non-contiguous areas throughout northeastern France that the French government isolated after the First World War. The land, which originally covered more than 1,200 square kilometres (460 square miles), was deemed too physically and environmentally damaged by conflict for human habitation. Rather than attempt to immediately clean up the former battlefields, the land was allowed to return to nature. Restrictions within the Zone rouge still exist today, although the control areas have been greatly reduced.
And it will be a while until this area is habitable again.
Quote:
According to the Scurit Civile, the French agency in charge of the land management of Zone rouge, 300 to 700 more years at this current rate will be needed to clean the area completely.
300-700 years is a **** estimate. That means they don't know concentrations of or really even what chemicals they have loose out there. Cheap asses need to pony up and get a good environmental assessment done. I bet a lot of that stuff is non detect now.
French farmers in former red zone areas still find about 900 tons of unexploded ordnance each year. It's so common they have roadside dropoffs for UXO, and some current no go zones are estimated to have 120 pieces of UXO per acre in the top 6" of soil. That's how they've gotten to the estimate they have. And it's probably not far off. There were about 1.5
billion shells fired on the western front, and they had dud rates around 10%-15%. That means anywhere from 150 to 225 million duds were scattered across the area, and they were especially concentrated in places like Verdun and the Somme where the most intense battles and barrages took place. There are likely millions of tons of UXO still in those areas.
There are also untold numbers of unexploded gas shells and contamination from chemical weapons, and the French
do study and track these areas because of those. The Place a Gaz near Verdun has arsenic concentrations of almost 20% in the top soil because of chemical weapons used and disposed of there. Other areas have extremely high concentrations of mercury, lead, and other heavy metals and toxins over areas measured in square miles because of the amount of ordnance and chemical weapons used there. Some areas still have 10,000 times the normal levels of heavy metals and toxic perchlorates from propellants and deteriorated UXO in the ground water.
This was not a minor, localized spill. It was a complete saturation over the course of years and thousands of square miles on an industrial scale. It actually will take hundreds of years to clear and dissipate.
