The Globe and Mail, Friday, April 20, 2001

	'One in three shells didn't explode'
	In the Belgian army bomb-disposal unit, the First World War and its leftovers are daily realities
	By Alan Freeman
	POPERINGE, BELGIUM -- Just last month, farmer Noel St-Germain spotted several rusty mortar shells on a muddy field outside this town in southern Belgium. He called the police, which got in touch with the Belgian army's bomb-disposal unit.
	By the time the bomb squad had dug a couple of metres into the Flanders field, it had uncovered a storage site containing no fewer than 1,100 eight-centimetre British shells, originally destined for the front lines but sitting undisturbed since the end of the First World War -- more than eight decades ago.
	"Every year, we find at least one storage site like this," said Captain Luc Moerman, a company commander for DOVO, the Belgian army's Service for the Disposal and Destruction of Explosive Devices.
	In Canada, the 1914-18 war is the stuff of history books and annual Remembrance Day ceremonies, but in the former battlefields of Belgium and northern France, the war remains a daily reality and an occasional danger.
	Squads of DOVO's 150 bomb-disposal experts regularly fan out through the Belgian countryside, answering some of the 3,000 calls the service receives annually to pick up unexploded grenades, mortar shells and other ordnance -- the vast majority from the First World War.
	Estimates are that no fewer than 1.5 billion projectiles were shipped to the front lines during the war. But millions were not fired, and millions more failed to blow up because of shoddy production techniques.
	"We know one in three shells didn't explode," Capt. Moerman said. DOVO collected 300 tonnes of unexploded ordnance last year.
	Shells still occasionally explode, killing or injuring those who handle them. Sometimes these people are curious civilians, but professionals are also at risk. Two French disposal experts were killed at Vimy in 1998 when a shell exploded, and four Belgian experts died in an explosion in 1986.
	Last weekend, across the border in France, 12,000 people were evacuated over a three-kilometre zone around the town of Vimy after officials determined that a stockpile of shells could explode and spread toxic gas fumes. Residents will likely not be allowed back in their homes until this weekend.
	The Vimy site contained 173 tonnes of munitions -- 16,000 projectiles, most of them filled with phosgene and mustard gas, much-feared poison gases that attack eyes, skin and lungs, causing irritation, blistering and even death.
	Disposal is relatively simple with standard ordnance, such as the shells in Mr. St-Germain's field. They were transported to DOVO's base at Poelkapelle to be destroyed in a controlled explosion.
	Disposal is more difficult with gas shells and their deadly fumes. They used to be encased in concrete and dumped at sea, but that practice is now illegal under terms of an international convention on chemical warfare. Belgium stopped ocean dumping in 1980.
	Belgian officials say they are years ahead of the French in dealing with this unwanted legacy of war, particularly when it comes to gas shells. At Poelkapelle (just a couple of kilometres from St. Julien, where 2,000 Canadians died in a German gas attack in April, 1915), Belgium has opened a $25-million disposal facility that can deal with most kinds of gas shells. There is nothing of its kind in France.
	According to Capt. Moerman, about 90 per cent of incoming shells are easily identified as non-toxic and sent to special outdoor storage areas where they are placed in crates to await controlled destruction. Determining which of the remainder are gas shells can be tricky.
	Suspect shells are thoroughly cleaned of rust and X-rayed for liquid content, an indication they are capable of producing toxic gas.
	In the next sensitive step, a robotic drill makes a hole in the shell at a spot above the liquid and below the explosive in the tip.
	"We don't want to drill into the explosive because we risk an explosion, and we don't want to drill into the toxic material because we risk contaminating the installation," Capt. Moerman said.
	A small quantity of the liquid is extracted through the hole and a lab determines its exact chemical makeup.
	Robotic equipment then lops off the top of the shell and the contents are poured into one of three separate barrels, depending on the chemical composition.
	The barrels are sent to a licensed facility, where the chemicals are burned and destroyed at high temperatures.
	The process is incredibly time-consuming.
	In its two years of operation, the facility has only disposed of 1,000 toxic items. About 25,000 suspect shells are stored at the site.
	Capt. Moerman said the facility had typical startup problems but now works more efficiently.
	The goal is to process the backlog within the next five years, he said, freeing the facility to handle shells as they are brought in.
	Considering that the volume of annual collections has remained stable for 22 years, Capt. Moerman doesn't worry about running out of work.
	"We will probably be at this for at least another 22 years. I'll be on my pension by the time we begin to resolve this problem," the 33-year-old officer said.

The Globe and Mail, Monday, April 16, 2001

• Gas leak stalls cleanup of munitions 
• French army contains problem, continues securing WWI arms depot near Vimy
• By  FABRICE POISBLAUD, VIMY, FRANCE -- French army experts clad in bodysuits and oxygen masks braved a poison-gas alert yesterday during emergency work to neutralize a volatile First World War munitions dump in northern France.
• Work was halted for about 25 minutes after leaks were found from a shell containing phosgene gas, a choking agent. But experts neutralized the leak with water and bomb-disposal squads later resumed the painstaking job of unloading and resealing the arms one by one to secure the depot near the deserted town of Vimy.
• "The leak was immediately contained by the equipment put in place at the site," the local government said in a statement. The minor vapour cloud was neutralized within the complex by a wall of water sprays installed by fire fighters.
• More than 12,000 people from Vimy and the surrounding region spent Easter Sunday in school buildings, holiday camps and hotel rooms requisitioned in a mass removal of people within three kilometres of the rundown munitions compound known as Bear's Mouth.
• Vimy, the location where Canadian troops launched a bloody assault on German trenches in Easter of 1917, has served for more than 25 years as an open-air dump for munitions that are still regularly found in the fields and beaches of northern France.
• Some 173 tonnes of bombs, shells and mines are stacked in the open-air compound, where the state of decay prompted a sudden government order last week to evacuate and transfer the bulk of the arms to former nuclear warhead silos at a nearby army camp.
• In addition to phosgene, the Vimy stockpile is believed to contain shells of mustard gas, the most lethal of all poisonous chemicals used in the 1914-1918 war. Mustard gas causes internal bleeding, blindness and slowly destroys the lungs of victims.
• Small army teams took turns dismantling the piles of often mouldy shell-storage crates, slowly loading the most dangerous of the arms into new crates for transport by cold-storage trucks to the Suippes army camp near Reims, south of Vimy. "There's absolutely nothing to fear there," General François Gaubert, regional commander for France's northern defence force, said of the Suippes silo complex. "We're talking about a site which was used for decades as a hold for nuclear warheads."
• The shells were to be stashed in underground bunkers. "Even if the whole lot blew up in there, nothing would get out," he said.
• The French environmental group Robin des Bois condemned the way the Vimy depot centre had grown throughout decades despite repeated assurances by local government officials that the contents would be moved without delay.
• Robin des Bois referred to the leftover munitions as "orphans of the interior and defence ministries who don't have the money to deal with the matter."
• Instead of taking necessary precautions, the authorities allowed a dangerous situation to develop, the group said.
• Police yesterday sealed off a highway and several secondary roads to ensure safe passage for the convoy of trucks scheduled to leave Vimy for Suippes.

Unearthing Vimy's underground

• 45 km of tunnels: Famous battlefield a giant time capsule for excavators
• Chris Wattie
• National Post 10 Nov 2001 
• VIMY RIDGE, France - At the bottom of a long, steep tunnel that slants deep into the chalk and stone beneath Vimy Ridge, a time capsule has been opened, just a crack, offering a glimpse into a little-known side of the famous Canadian victory in the First World War.
• A group of engineers, explosives experts and historians succeeded last month in locating and re-opening the tunnel labelled O-64E by the Canadian soldiers who carved it out of the French bedrock 84 years ago to listen in on their German foes.
• Thick timbers still lie where the men left them in 1917, and chalk dust coats the ground. The tunnel's rough-hewn walls are marked by a scattering of graffiti, recording names and battalion numbers or cheeky barbs such as the one chiselled in the chalk near the top of the passage -- "Sgt/Maj. L--[indecipherable] is a S.O.B." -- all of them left by the sappers who played a pivotal role in the Canadian victory at Vimy.
• On Easter Monday, 1917, thousands of Canadian soldiers, fighting together in one corps for the first time, attacked the German-held ridge and took it in a lightning assault unprecedented in the era of trench warfare.
• Much of the Canadians' success was due to the hidden work of the tunnelling companies, men who toiled underground for months before the battle.
• Buried deep below the Vimy Memorial's towering white spires, rolling lawns, painstakingly preserved trenches and grass-covered shell craters are kilometres of tunnels. There are "subways" to move troops and supplies to the front line; "mines" filled with explosives and detonated below German trenches with devastating effect; and "saps," or listening posts, to detect and block enemy tunnellers.
• "People think it was all trenches and going over the top," says Lieutenant-Colonel Phillip Robinson, a retired British Army engineer who helped find and clear O-64E. "But by 1917, both armies had in fact gone underground in a big way. Whole battles were fought in the tunnels, hand-to-hand with knives and spades, in complete darkness."
• Lt.-Col Robinson squints into the dank, gloomy depths as if he were looking into the tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh. "What we see on the surface is just a small part of what were vast subterranean fortresses."
• Lt.-Col. Robinson is a member of the Durand Group, an association of about 30 former military officers dedicated to exploring the long-abandoned tunnels and bunkers of the First World War.
• His team spent the summer pulling out tonnes of rubble and earth blocking O-64E. About three weeks ago, they broke through the debris to find the tunnel, unblocked and levelling off into the darkness toward what was once no man's land.
• "In some of the tunnels we've excavated, you can still see footprints in the chalk dust -- undisturbed for 85 years," he says with a grin. "We didn't find much on the way down [O-64E] -- a little ordinance ... and quite a bit of graffiti.
• "Most of it isn't too bad," he confides, "but farther up, it gets somewhat more bawdy."
• Lt.-Col. Robinson and his team hope to find more artifacts when they finish clearing out the bottom of the tunnel. "Once," he says, pausing for effect, "we found an intact German helmet."
• But with winter on the way, the explorers have to content themselves with no more than a tantalizing peek through the narrow gap between the ceiling and the last of the rubble, yet to be cleared.
• "You can shine your torch down and see what lies beyond," Lt.-Col. Robinson says ruefully, shaking his head. "One could wriggle through quite easily, and I can tell you the temptation was there, but the rest of the group would kill me if I went through before the proper safety precautions were taken."
• The work can be dangerous: The old tunnels contain many hazards -- pockets of carbon monoxide, unexploded shells or grenades, and unstable walls that could collapse at any moment.
• In 1998, one of the group's members was killed in a cave-in deep beneath the ridge. This year, poison gas leaked from a First World War shell stored near the Vimy monument and forced the evacuation of thousands of villagers.
• Clearing out the old explosives is part of the Durand Group's mandate, although Lt.-Col. Robinson, a tunnelling specialist, admits: "I wouldn't touch them myself -- I leave that to the experts.
• "There's one unexploded piece of ordinance per square yard here," he says. "At the current rate of removal, it will take about 800 years to clear it all out."
• The Durand Group is working for the French government and for Veterans Affairs Canada, which manages the 100-hectare Vimy site, mapping out the maze of tunnels and bunkers that honeycomb the area and ensuring they are safe.
• Lt.-Col. Robinson says that can be a tall order.
• "There's about 45 kilometres of tunnel all along the ridge, and that's not counting the old dugouts," he says, emerging from the tunnel to peer over the line of trees growing where the Canadian front line once stood in 1917. "We've only been able to get into a fairly small portion of that."
• André Smith is the director of Veterans Affairs' Canadian Battlefield Memorials Restoration Project, a $30-million, five-year effort to restore and preserve Canada's memorials and historic sites in Europe, of which Vimy is the largest example. He says the Durand Group is an invaluable part of efforts to ensure places such as Vimy are safe for visitors.
• "The whole site -- even 80 years later -- is in many ways still an active battlefield," he says. "The archeological aspect is a nice bonus, but safety is the prime reason for this work."
• The group's past forays into the Vimy underground, which Mr. Smith calls "the best-kept secret of Vimy," have produced a wealth of artifacts left behind by the Canadian soldiers who took the ridge.
• "These tunnels are time capsules," he says. "They've been left exactly the way they were in 1917, and it's a rare privilege to be able to look into them."