The Real No-Go Zone
May 26, 2015 4:46 PM   Subscribe

"When you imagine France and its scenic countryside, you might think of the picturesque villages, vineyards a plenty and endless rolling green hills to drive through on a blissful summer road trip. But there’s one corner of this scenic country that no one has been allowed to enter for nearly a century, known as the 'Zone Rouge'."
posted by orange swan (34 comments total) 67 users marked this as a favorite
 
That's fascinating and tragic. I knew unexploded munitions were still a problem in France, but not that big of a problem.
posted by marxchivist at 4:52 PM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Those contamination levels are astounding. For the munitions, some giant roomba/spider thing waltzing around might help? But I never imagined something like this in France. It's so . . . Chernobyl.
posted by yesster at 4:55 PM on May 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


They call it the “iron harvest”, in which nearly 900 tons of unexploded munitions are recovered each year by Belgian and French farmers after ploughing their fields.

And thus ends my dream of retiring to run a small herb farm in rural northern France.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 5:04 PM on May 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


Authorities estimate that if they continue working at the current rate, it could take anywhere from 300 to 700 years to complete.
The war to end all wars.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 5:16 PM on May 26, 2015 [14 favorites]


Good lord. I had no idea. It makes sense such areas exist, though. It does make one wonder what the eventual result of all that depleted uranium the US and its allies have been tossing around the Middle East and Afghanistan for the past decade and a half will be.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:22 PM on May 26, 2015 [13 favorites]


Wow, this a haunting, wonderful, sad scary post.
posted by vrakatar at 5:25 PM on May 26, 2015 [6 favorites]


It does make one wonder what the eventual result of all that depleted uranium the US and its allies have been tossing around the Middle East and Afghanistan for the past decade and a half will be.

Yes. And an even more horrifying article could be written about Vietnam.
posted by orange swan at 5:27 PM on May 26, 2015 [15 favorites]


Wow. I'm gobsmacked. Thanks OP.
posted by drowsy at 5:31 PM on May 26, 2015


all that depleted uranium the US and its allies have been tossing around the Middle East and Afghanistan for the past decade and a half will be

FWIW DU has been of concern since Gulf War I. 25 years. Hundreds and hundreds of tonnes just lieing about.
These wars are low grade nuclear wars.
posted by edgeways at 5:38 PM on May 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


It's not the radioactive part so much as the fact that it's a heavy metal and chemically toxic. It's not a nuclear threat it's a chemical one.
posted by Zalzidrax at 6:11 PM on May 26, 2015 [6 favorites]


These wars are low grade nuclear wars.

No.

Here's how you tell a nuclear war is happening.

There is a very big flash.

Five seconds later, open your eyes.

Are a few square miles of a city gone?

Are there few tens of thousands of people now dead?

If so, then you are looking at a nuclear war.

If not, then you are not in any way shape or form looking at a nuclear war.

There's no fuzzy line here. Cities are dying in seconds, or they are not. It's a very simple test. If you go from nice sunny day to square miles of destruction and thousands dead in a second, that's a nuclear weapon. Otherwise, it ain't.

Calling anything else a nuclear war is just lying. If you're in one, you'll either know it, or you'll be lucky enough to be dead instantly. Reason #7 of many that I live near the center of a very large city with BIG JUICY TARGET NUKE ME on it, because I don't want to live in post nuke Earth, I've seen Threads, and if you want to sleep this week, I really suggest you don't.
posted by eriko at 6:19 PM on May 26, 2015 [19 favorites]


And an even more horrifying article could be written about Vietnam.

Or Laos - I took a class on the Vietnam War once, and we saw a documentary about cluster bombs. Hands down the most horrifying thing I've ever seen. Cluster bombs kill people all the time, and because they look kind of like fruit, a lot of the people killed are children who try to pick them up.
posted by teponaztli at 6:35 PM on May 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


Chill. Yeah, seen Threads, The Day After and all that, I'm in your age bracket and also went through the Reagan years, etfc.

I'm not ''lying'' or being disengenious or whatever it was to get your hackles up.
In my opinion there are multiple stages in a nuclear war. The blast is the most dramatic and high profile aspect. The ongoing toxcity /radioactivity/genetic damage is another aspect of it.
If we dump large, staggeringly large, amounts of low grade radioactive material off and on for a quarter century there will be similar consequences, on top of the heavy metal issues.
I'd wager Iraqi is a nightmare of toxicity nowadays.
posted by edgeways at 6:42 PM on May 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


The article is pretty sensationalistic, and the map they show is so misleading as to be a lie. The fenced-off areas are a few small bits of forest here and there, but the map hints that large swathes of north and north-eastern France are marked as 'red zone', including the area in which I grew up. It's very densely populated, and, needless to say, not a minefield. Every now and then a tractor unearths a shell, the demining agency blows it up, no one is unduly fazed. My family were farmers, and I grew up amongst farmers. No one ever had any concern about buried ammunition, and certainly no one ever used the term 'iron harvest'.
posted by Spanner Nic at 6:46 PM on May 26, 2015 [12 favorites]


It looks like the 17% arsenic in soil number is from this paper, which looked at a particular area northeast of Verdun where 200,000 shells stored in a German ammunition depot were destroyed in the 1920s. They basically built a big bonfire out of shells and firewood, with the occasional explosive sprinkled on like lighter fluid to ensure a good burn. Many of these shells contained diphenylchloroarsine or diphenylcyanoarsine, arsenic-based chemical weapons that make you puke. Thus the super high concentration of arsenic.

The paper also mentions that 1 billion artillery shells were fired during WWI. War sucks.
posted by bismol at 6:51 PM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Reason #7 of many that I live near the center of a very large city with BIG JUICY TARGET NUKE ME on it, because I don't want to live in post nuke Earth, I've seen Threads, and if you want to sleep this week, I really suggest you don't.
Please don't forget about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Really, we all live in "post nuke Earth".
posted by peacheater at 7:22 PM on May 26, 2015 [4 favorites]


Amazing; thank you for posting this.
posted by LobsterMitten at 8:16 PM on May 26, 2015


The most evocative part for Dan Carlin's excellent "Blueprint for Armageddon" series on WWI was when he described how the German government, running out of raw materials, began scavenging and plundering its own cultural heritage. In one village, the authorities confiscated the town's church bell, to melt it down to make bullets. It was the bell that, for generations, had announced weddings and masses and cultural events. When the authorities came to take it, the village people all showed up and, almost in a funeral like procession, mourned the passing of the bell as it travelled through town before being handed over.

Now the pieces of that bell are likely scattered here, from one broken village to another.
posted by cacofonie at 8:36 PM on May 26, 2015 [10 favorites]


yesster: "Those contamination levels are astounding. For the munitions, some giant roomba/spider thing waltzing around might help? But I never imagined something like this in France. It's so . . . Chernobyl."

Not so much. Chernobyl was one tragic accident. These areas are nothing more than a savage testiment to man's desire to kill man.
posted by Samizdata at 8:51 PM on May 26, 2015


eriko: "These wars are low grade nuclear wars.

No.

Here's how you tell a nuclear war is happening.

There is a very big flash.

Five seconds later, open your eyes.

Are a few square miles of a city gone?

Are there few tens of thousands of people now dead?

If so, then you are looking at a nuclear war.

If not, then you are not in any way shape or form looking at a nuclear war.

There's no fuzzy line here. Cities are dying in seconds, or they are not. It's a very simple test. If you go from nice sunny day to square miles of destruction and thousands dead in a second, that's a nuclear weapon. Otherwise, it ain't.

Calling anything else a nuclear war is just lying. If you're in one, you'll either know it, or you'll be lucky enough to be dead instantly. Reason #7 of many that I live near the center of a very large city with BIG JUICY TARGET NUKE ME on it, because I don't want to live in post nuke Earth, I've seen Threads, and if you want to sleep this week, I really suggest you don't.
"

Of course, you are neglecting radiological weapons, which are quite appropriate to the discussion...
posted by Samizdata at 8:52 PM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]



all that depleted uranium the US and its allies have been tossing around the Middle East and Afghanistan for the past decade and a half will be

FWIW DU has been of concern since Gulf War I. 25 years. Hundreds and hundreds of tonnes just lieing about.
These wars are low grade nuclear wars.


Don't we all wish it was "just lieing about".

Uranium is highly combustible:
There have been several cases throughout the DOE Complex where massivepieces of metallic uranium have ignited at room temperature.Spontaneous fires involving uranium chips, however, are much morecommon. In one case, ignition occurred after 6 months of storage and, in asecond case, briquetted uranium chips stored in a drum for several weeksignited when the drum was opened. Two instances involving uranium chipsgenerated at Rocky Flats are worth mentioning. In June, 1970, a drum of RFP waste in temporary storage above-ground at INEL began smoldering. The drum was removed from storage and the fire smothered with dirt. Thedrum contents included dirt, combustibles, plastic and glass bottles.When one large solid object was removed it burst into flame and had to beextinguished. This material was identified as depleted uranium chips.The only conclusion drawn from the investigation was a fire caused by thespontaneous ignition of uranium. In August, 1976, another incident at ...
and burns to a fine powder.

'The answer my friends ...'
posted by jamjam at 9:27 PM on May 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


Yeah, I live in Hiroshima and it's pretty nice. This zone rouge, however... I hope in 500 years when it's still contaminated, people remember to keep out.

Great post.
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 9:52 PM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


The article is pretty sensationalistic, and the map they show is so misleading as to be a lie.

The map pretty clearly says it represents damaged areas in 1914-1918, that is, the original 1200 sqm. It is derived from a map first published in 1921. I guess the author was just confused about the scale and source, because they do say that only 100 sqm is left nowadays.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:59 PM on May 26, 2015


This is a grim and fascinating topic, but given the article has an 'artists impression' at the top that appears to show a soldier holding an AK variant, modern backpack and radio (and which appears to have been posted extensively to /r/creepy and Stalker game fan boards), I'd take the rest of the slightly breathless claims with a handful of salt.

Obviously, these zones still exist and the fact of their existence and the state they were in immediately after the war is horrific. But, much like Chernobyl, I take a little comfort in the fact that, when left alone, the Earth does recover. It might take a hundred or two hundred years, but eventually this whole ball of rock will shrug us off like a winter cold.
posted by Happy Dave at 4:11 AM on May 27, 2015


There’s a true story for you, FOX News.

Huh?
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 5:19 AM on May 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


The map was used in a super misleading wat because while the text on the map itself does indicate that it's illustrating 1918 levels, the text which comes first, is larger, and which I bothered to read because it was in a language I speak is in the present tense and makes no indication that it isn't current.

Very sensationalistic article over all, but the subject is interesting.
posted by bracems at 7:40 AM on May 27, 2015


A great book on this topic is Aftermath: The Remnants of War by Donovan Webster. The first chapter is devoted to France's "Zone Rouge" and some of it is available on Google Books. One creepy anecdote among many in there is the description of hearing the liquid chemical agents sloshing around inside a rusty old gas shell.

There's also this piece from Orion Magazine which includes a haunting account of the deaths of two démineurs in 2007.
posted by Wretch729 at 8:44 AM on May 27, 2015 [2 favorites]


There’s a true story for you, FOX News.

Huh?
Reference to the breathless reporting by said broadcaster about no-go areas in French cities for non-Muslims, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. (You might remember Birmingham (UK flavour) was declared a no-go city too.)
posted by MartinWisse at 12:02 PM on May 27, 2015


Wow. I had no idea about this. That's a huge area! And access has only been forbidden within the last few years...
posted by SisterHavana at 1:15 PM on May 27, 2015


Incredible stuff. Thanks so much for posting this. I had no idea.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 1:40 PM on May 27, 2015


Clearing the red zone is an extremely dangerous job, and fatal casualties from gas shells are not uncommon amongst munitions removers.
Well, you know what they say, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
posted by officer_fred at 7:17 PM on May 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


A very interesting thing to learn about. Thanks, orange swan.
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:39 PM on May 28, 2015


The article is pretty sensationalistic, and the map they show is so misleading as to be a lie.

So does anyone have a current map? Or does the "red zone" in the map roughly reflect the current uncleared land?
posted by joshwa at 10:01 AM on May 31, 2015


joshwa I haven't been able to find a current map (not speaking French doesn't help) but I think part of the problem is the line between "forbidden" and "cleared" is pretty fuzzy. Several of the sources linked mention that even in areas declared 'clear" hazards remain, with farmers still finding stuff in their fields, high levels of lead, arsenic, and other toxic compounds in the soil, etc. Seems like an example of the locals knowing a lot more about which places are (relatively) safe and which aren't and the French authorities trying to keep the whole thing a little vague and quiet to discourage adventurers from wandering around and getting blown up.
posted by Wretch729 at 10:42 AM on May 31, 2015


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