Zone Rouge



The Zone Rouge (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 1200 km2, was deemed to be physically and environmentally too damaged by the 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 zone rouge still exist today although the control areas have been greatly reduced.

The "zone rouge" 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 zone rouge. This was 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 area is saturated with unexploded shells (including many gas shells), grenades, and rusty 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.

Each year dozens of tons of unexploded shells are recovered. According to the Sécurité Civile agency in charge, at the current rate no fewer than 700 more years will be needed to completely clean the area. Some experiments conducted in 2005–06 discovered up to 300 shells/10,000 m2 in the top 15 cm of soil in the worst areas.

Some areas remain off limits (for example two small pieces of land close to Ypres and Woëvre) where 99% of all plants still die, as arsenic can constitute up to 17% of some soil samples (Bausinger, Bonnaire, and Preuß, 2007).