The sinking of “La Fidèle” in the Cape Lévi trough, mentioned on nautical charts as an underwater explosive ordnance depot, illustrates the growing dangers of storing, dismantling and disposing of remnants of war or obsolete munitions.
On land, the storage of engines of war is precarious. At Vimy, near Arras in the Pas-de-Calais, the 500-tonne depot of engines of war collected in the region challenges safety regulations. It is open to all kinds of raids through the gaps in the wire fence.
On the coast, in December 1996, the premature explosion of 15 tonnes of shells, near the dunes of the Pointe de Maye, in the Bay of the Somme and beyond the safety perimeter, slightly injured two pyrotechnicians and led to the evacuation for several hours of 350 local residents threatened by phosphorus fumes.
At sea, underwater munitions dumps are sources of arsenic, lead and mercury contamination of benthic sediments. Between 1982 and 1995, the British Geological Survey recorded through its seismic detection network 25 detonations attributed to spontaneous explosions of munitions in the Beaufort’s Dyke depot in the Irish Sea. To the west of Cherbourg, in the Casquets trough, another underwater dump used by military navies, the presence of munitions dumped by the countries bordering the North Sea generates risks of explosion and contamination which, according to the Ministry of the Environment, prevent any intervention on the drums of radioactive waste dumped by Belgium and England between 1950 and 1963.
The Robin des Bois NGO is calling on the Ministry of Defence to develop, coordinate and finance military waste management plans with specific budgets, and to draw up an inventory of all underwater dumps with their consequences for the marine environment and maritime safety. The neutralisation and storage of weapons no longer in use should be a priority research programme for the European Commission.
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