Zone rouge

File:Red Zone Map-fr.svg

Map showing conditions immediately following the war: totally destroyed areas in red, areas of major damage in yellow, moderately damaged areas in green, and undamaged areas in blue

File:German trench Delville Wood September 1916.jpg

A German trench at Delville Wood, near Longueval (Somme), that was destroyed in 1916 in the Red Zone

File:Battelfield Verdun.JPG

Verdun battlefield (2005)

The (English: 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 , 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 still exist today, although the control areas have been greatly reduced.

The was defined just after the war as "Completely devastated. Damage to properties: 100%. Damage to Agriculture: 100%. Impossible to clean. Human life impossible".

Under French law, activities such as housing, farming, or forestry were temporarily or permanently forbidden in the , because of the vast amounts of human and animal remains, and millions of items of unexploded ordnance contaminating the land. Some towns and villages were never permitted to be rebuilt after the war.

Main dangers

The areas are saturated with unexploded shells (including many gas shells), grenades, and rusting ammunition. Soils were heavily polluted by lead, mercury, chlorine, arsenic, various dangerous gases, acids, and human and animal remains. The area was also littered with ammunition depots and chemical plants. The land of the Western Front is covered in old trenches and shell holes.

Each year, numerous unexploded shells are recovered from former WWI battlefields in what is known as the iron harvest. According to the , the French agency in charge of the land management of , 300 to 700 more years at this current rate will be needed to clean the area completely. Some experiments conducted in 2005–06 discovered up to 300 shells per hectare (120 per acre) in the top of soil in the worst areas.

Areas where 99% of all plants still die remain off limits. For example, there are two small areas of land close to Ypres and the Woëvre where arsenic constitutes up to 176 grams per kilogram (18%) in the soil. In the 1920s, chemical warfare shells containing arsenic were destroyed there by thermal treatment.

See also

• French villages destroyed in the First World War
• Demilitarized zone
• Involuntary park
• Iron harvest
• No man's land
• Pripyat

Further reading

• 212 pages.
• 288 pages.

External links

• Map of the Western Front in 1918 Template:In lang
• Template:In lang