Zone rouge

[1] Under French law, activities such as housing, farming, or forestry were temporarily or permanently forbidden in the Zone Rouge, because of the vast amounts of human and animal remains, and millions of items of unexploded ordnance contaminating the land.

Soils were heavily polluted by lead, mercury, chlorine, arsenic, various dangerous gases, acids, and human and animal remains.

According to the Sécurité 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.

[2] Some experiments conducted in 2005–06 discovered up to 300 shells per hectare (120 per acre) in the top 15 centimetres (5.9 inches) of soil in the worst areas.

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.

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
A German trench at Delville Wood , near Longueval ( Somme ), that was destroyed in 1916 in the Red Zone
Verdun battlefield (2005)