OREANDA-NEWS. Mustard gas leaked from bombs and grenades from the First World War, located in the waters of the North Sea near the resort town of Knokke-Heist, the newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws reported on Thursday. According to her, the governor of the province of West Flanders, Philippe De Baker, demanded to save the resort area of the "cemetery" of about 35 thousand tons of ammunition. "It is better to do this today than to wait for the leak (gas) to be more ambitious," - says the publication of the words of De Baker.

Each year, Belgian and Dutch fishermen retrieve hundreds of unexploded bottom mines in nets from the waters of the North Sea. Most of them were laid in the waters of the allies of the anti-Hitler coalition in World War II.  In April 2005, a fishing vessel flying the Dutch flag was blown up on a 125-kilogram mine in the North Sea, killing three fishermen.

After this incident, the command of the Navy of Belgium and the Netherlands decided to conduct a joint operation "Beneficial Cooperation" (Beneficial Cooperation) to search for and destroy in the North Sea mines from the Second World War. According to experts, in the waters of the North Sea there are over four million units of sea mines dropped here during the Second World War not only by the fleet of fascist Germany, but also by the fleets of the allies in the anti-Hitler coalition.

To this should be added the hundreds of thousands of unexploded torpedoes and aerial bombs below, which lie at the bottom of this sea since the times of world wars. Since most of the ammunition is located at great depths, where scuba divers and sappers won't be able to work, due to the inability of a person to withstand such pressure, a special remote-controlled Seafox submarine is used to detect and destroy them.