Ammunition dumped in Swiss lakes again spark controversy in Geneva | There are about 8,000 tons of explosives underwater

At Switzerland, with the end of World War II, thousands of tons of ammunition and other explosives were thrown into the lakes. Although the local military resigned years ago to retrieve the submerged material, the problem has recently been the subject of debate again in the United States. Geneva due to the discovery in Lake Geneva of a series of cracked boxes.

According to the Swiss authorities, in the last century, to get rid of these weapons after explosions in certain warehouses, the army dived more than 8,000 tons of ammunition in the lakes of Thun, Brienz and Lucerne, in the center of the country, in deeper waters and with less movement than those of Geneva.

“It is mainly aircraft bombs, grenades, usual cartridges and explosives residues “, detailed a spokesperson for the Federal Ministry of Defense, Mireille Fleury. The objects are covered with a thick and growing layer of sediment, which, according to experts, would exclude possible dangers or negative impacts on water.

At GenevaHowever, divers from the French organization Odysseus 3.1 found in 2019 cracked crates with ammunition 50 meters deep. “From the moment when these munitions are not covered with sediment and that one is in shallow water, one can reasonably imagine more significant corrosion phenomena” than in the rest of the Swiss lakes, warned the geologist Jacques Martelain .

So, in the coming weeks, The Geneva authorities will launch operations to take an inventory of this arsenal which has been sleeping for decades at the bottom of this iconic lake, the largest in the Alps. “In the fall, we will be testing localization techniques. We will be detecting metallic masses coming from ships that will use submerged probes.”, specifies Martelain.

The research will be deployed first in a shallow area, 50 to 100 meters. It is on the basis of the results of these technical investigations and of the risk study that Geneva will decide whether or not to recover the ammunition.

As in Geneva it was not the army that submerged the ammunition but the armaments company Hispano-Suiza, the authorities will try to determine if a regulation of the time could lead this company to pay part of the remediation that needs to be done.

“The only solution is complete sanitation”

Analyzes carried out in the early 2000s by the Federal Department of Defense estimated the weight of the material submerged in Geneva between 150 and 1,000 tonnes, without however being able to determine its location or exact nature.

“There are, in principle, bombs and howitzers, and probably ammunition for rifles”, while some evoke the presence of phosgene bombs, a deadly gas, said Martelain.

Former Geneva MP, and also a diver, Salima Moyard, has been fighting for years for the city to tackle the problem. “The only viable long-term solution is complete, total sanitation“he claimed.

“There are people who might consider the small challenge of getting some ammunition to put near their fireplace. It can be very serious: for the people themselves, for the neighbors, for the environment “, alerted the specialist.