Switzerland’s lakes reflect its craggy mountains and lap against its cities. Their blue surfaces are peaceful. And the waters are, seemingly, pristine.
But the placid exterior covers an explosive problem: Unspent military munitions lie deep below the waters, a fact that could eventually damage the lakes’ fragile ecosystems. So Switzerland is trying to crowdsource ideas for how to eventually extract the weapons if they begin contaminating the water.
The country has kicked off a competition with a cash prize of 50,000 Swiss francs, or about $58,000, to be shared by the three best proposals for removing ammunition that was dumped in the lakes over decades. But it must be done in an environmentally friendly and safe way.
There is no immediate need, the announcement stressed: Switzerland monitors the waters and officials said that a leak of pollutants from the munitions would be “against all expectations.”
“Regular monitoring of the lake water and sediments currently shows no negative effects from the dumped munitions,” Samanta Leiser, a spokeswoman for the Swiss federal office for defense procurement, wrote in an email, adding that the department “does not expect this to change.”
Rather, the country is trying to plan for a worst-case scenario about 20 years after an assessment showed that a cleanup of the explosives could “lead to massive sludge turbulence and high risks for the sensitive ecosystem,” the prize announcement explained.
But some experts say that trying to remove the munitions, even if they did start polluting the lakes, could far outweigh the dangers of leaving them be.
Mike Sainsbury, the managing director of Zetica, a British company that specializes in handling unexploded ordnance, said that if the munitions were not immediately hazardous, or if they were not likely to degrade in a harmful way, “We’d probably advocate leaving it alone.”
Luckily for Switzerland, there are many companies across Europe that research, detect, investigate, contain and sometimes dispose of munitions left over from World War I, World War II and other conflicts.
They stay busy: Old bombs can disrupt daily life in German cities like Frankfurt and Berlin. They also occasionally appear in Britain. Just this past week, more than 400 homes in Northern Ireland were evacuated after workers found what might have been a wartime bomb, the BBC reported.
As the armaments’ decades-old metals start to deteriorate, some wonder if such leftover weapons could be getting more dangerous. The debates have started to bite into decades of prevailing belief: Monitor the explosives, but — whenever possible — leave them well enough alone.
Switzerland, which has been officially neutral for more than 200 years, is not pockmarked by ammunition left over from active conflicts. But its military has at times needed to dispose of weaponry, including “problem ammunition, surplus or outdated service ammunition of the forces in perfect condition or even rejected batches from production,” the competition announcement said.
The bulk of the ammunition lies deep in three bodies of water: Lake Thun, Lake Brienz and Lake Lucerne, submerged there from 1918 to 1964, the announcement said. The dumping of the armaments came before the onset of the environmental movement, which gained international momentum in the 1960s.
Before that, lakes seemed like a safe bet to dispose of explosives because the water would contain any blasts.
“There was a belief that water was self-purifying,” said Alex Souchen, a historian and assistant professor at the University of Guelph in Canada who specializes in underwater munitions and military pollution. “They just saw dilution as this ultimate solution for everything.”
At rest, the munitions left in the Swiss lakes, lying about 500 feet to 720 feet down, are not a blast risk for people. At such depths, the water would absorb any shock wave, Mr. Sainsbury, the Zetica executive, said. Even a major explosion might not even cause a ripple on the surface, he added.
But moving the munitions can be dangerous. Even though they are old, they can be lethal. So the munitions would need to be “forensically” removed one by one, Mr. Sainsbury noted.
“It would be a painstaking process,” he said.
There is debate about the environmental risk of leaving the munitions in the lakes. Metals degrade and chemicals seep, which can be toxic for the water, animals and humans. But moving the munitions to the surface, even to get rid of them, could spread their toxins much farther and much faster, experts said.
Just think of how pebbles fall and mud clouds the water when a handful of rocks is scooped up from a lake bed, Dr. Souchen said.
“Imagine that being an artillery shell, disintegrating as it moves through different water pressure levels,” he added. “If you disturb the site, you might cause more harm than if you just left them there.”
Read More: A Swiss Dilemma: How to Get Old Bombs Out of Deep Lakes?
