Members of the French armyclad in hooded bodysuits and oxygen masks braved a poison gas alert during emergency work to neutralise a volatile World War One munitions dump in northern France.
Work was halted after leaks from a shell containing phosgene gas, a choking agent, but bomb disposal squads later resumed the painstaking job of unloading and resealing the deadliest arms one-by-one to secure the depot near the deserted town of Vimy.
"The leak was immediately contained by the equipment put in place at the site," the local government office said in a statement. The minor vapor cloud was neutralized within the complex by a wall of water sprays installed by firemen.
More than 12,000 people from Vimy and the surrounding region spent Easter Sunday in school buildings, holiday camps and hotel rooms requisitioned in a mass evacuation of people within three kilometers (two miles) of the rundown compound known as "Bear's Mouth."
Vimy, the location where Canadian troops launched a bloody assault on German trenches in Easter 1917, has served for more than 25 years as an open-air dump for munitions that are still regularly found in the fields and beaches of northern France.
Some 173 tons of bombs, shells and mines are stacked in the open-air compound, where the state of decay prompted a sudden government order last week to evacuate and transfer the bulk of the arms to former nuclear warhead silos at a nearby army camp.
In addition to phosgene, the Vimy stockpile is believed to contain shells of mustard gas, the most lethal of all poisonous chemicals used in the 1914-1918 war. Mustard gas causes internal bleeding, blindness and slowly destroys the lungs of victims.
Small army teams took turns dismantling the piles of often moldy shell storage crates, slowly loading the most dangerous of the arms into new crates for transport by cold storage truck to the Suippes army camp near Reims, south of Vimy.
"There's absolutely nothing to fear there," General Francois Gaubert, regional commander for France's northern defense force, said of the Suippes silo complex. "We're talking about a site which was used for decades as a hold for nuclear warheads."
The shells were to be stashed in concrete underground bunkers. "Even if the whole lot blew up in there, nothing would get out," he said.
Policesealed off a motorway and several secondary roads to ensure safe passage for a convoy of trucks scheduled to leave Vimy for Suippes Sunday night.
The French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin,ordered the mass evacuation and mop-up operation Friday morning after a report that the Vimy site posed an increasing risk due to the state of decay of many of the weapons stocked inside a barbed wire perimeter fence.