Once, I was supposed to take a train from Munich back home to Padova. It's a fairly long train ride, but quite pleasant, as it's very scenic, and of course on trains you're free to move around, buy food, read, use electronics, and so on. It turned into an epic odyssey because they rerouted the thing through... Villach and Tarvisio in for northeastern Italy, due to a bomb near the tracks somewhere in northern Italy. That was a bit too far.
I wonder if that fraction has moved much. Wikipedia in the subject of the Ardennes, Verdun, and Unexploded Ordinance (UXOs):
> In the Ardennes region of France, large-scale citizen evacuations were necessary during MEC removal operations in 2001. In the forests of Verdun French government "démineurs" working for the Département du Déminage still hunt for poisonous, volatile, and/or explosive munitions and recover about 900 tons every year. The most feared are corroded artillery shells containing chemical warfare agents such as mustard gas. French and Flemish farmers still find many UXOs when ploughing their fields, the so-called "iron harvest".
I know these are often big bombs but 900 tonnes a year‽
I believe most of the stuff dug up that's called "Iron Harvest" in Northern France is WW1 artillery rather than WW2 bombs
https://strafexpedition1916.altervista.org/i-recuperanti-.ht...
Remember the Allies alone dropped _millions_ of tons of bombs, yet alone the tens (hundreds?) of millions of tons of shells fired across battlefields, and we've not even started counting grenades and other similar smaller ordinance.
900 tons is _nothing_ compared with the sheer amount fired in the European theatre, especially across both World Wars.
Also remember many of the prolonged battles were essentially fields of potted mud: along with period fuses, many of the shells simply landed in soft mud to slowly sink in.
I think it's definitely the case that many of those less involved in the European theatre (v. the near universal conscription of men in Europe) don't realise how intensive much of the fighting here was. These are wars that went on for years, often with the front lines scarcely moving for months, with continuous bombardment for the entire time.
Now you understand why mines are outlawed almost everywhere. Cleanup will never be done. Its just started in Bosnia for instance, with decades of work ahead of us.
If we assume (somehow!) half of that was dealt with quickly, that leaves 500,000 tons of UXO. If we assume 1000 tons are found per year, that's still 500 years to tidy up.
Across both wars the total may well be closer to 100M than 10M, so then that makes it 5000 years.
A couple of years ago an explosion went wrong, somebody died, and they built a new facility.
These are WWI ordnances. Ardennes and especially Verdun was the theather of one of the largest battle of the western front. That's trench warefare at it's worth. The whole region was chock-full of shells.