LREM deputy Sandrine Mörch called on the government to clean up a site on the outskirts of Toulouse where 5,000 tons of nitrocellulose, the powder from shells, have been buried for a century.
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Many local elected officials had done so before her, the landfill area being located near hospitals, the Garonne, and today an urban transport cable car under construction nearby. “ I alerted Florence Parly, Minister of the Armed Forces, about the depollution of the Braqueville ballast tanks. Since the end of the First World War 5,000 tonnes of nitrocellulose, an explosive powder, have been stored at the bottom of ponds, near the oncopole and on the Téléo route, the future cable car, ”said the deputy on social networks .
In four small artificial lakes called " ballast pits " (quarries from which the ballast is extracted), sleeping since 1917 a stock of nitrocellulose, an explosive with a power equivalent to TNT Mass produced during the First World War by the National Poudrerie, then established in this area, the authorities had decided to drown the many surpluses caused by the end of the conflict, the water rendering the explosive " inert ", according to the army.
In 2001, nearby, 300 tons of ammonium nitrate, the same substance that detonated in Beirut, exploded, spraying the AZF factory where they were stored and causing 31 deaths and devastation in Toulouse. At the beginning of 2017, at the end of François Hollande's mandate, his Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve had promised that pollution control would be " initiated by 2022 ". " No project relating to the depollution of the site has started ", regrets the deputy of the presidential majority.
