Dangers
Despite the condition of the shells, they remain very dangerous. The French Département du Déminage (Department of Mine Clearance) recovers about 900 tons of unexploded munitions every year. Since 1945, approximately 630 French minesweepers have died handling unexploded munitions. Two died handling munitions outside of Vimy, France as recently as 1998.
The rusting of the shells also pollutes the land and the water table - the land around the Ypres Salient and the Somme being intensively farmed whilst having excess iron (the metal from shells) in the soil, trees and vegetation over 90 years later. There have been reports of gas from unexploded chemical weapons seeping from buried caches underneath war cemeteries, requiring the closure and evacuation of the surrounding area, especially mills, where the oil used to lubricate the grinders was especially vulnerable to the gas. This gas often caused the oil to turn into what the workers called "Iron Grüdgdèl", which referred to its yellow color.
Read more about this topic: Iron Harvest
Famous quotes containing the word dangers:
“Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one’s enemies.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them.”
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975)
“The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)