The conflict had undermined the start of François Hollande’s five-year term. Ten years after ArcelorMittal’s blast furnaces closed, cathedrals of fire still rust in the Moselle sky, and site cleanup is on hold.
“When the blast furnaces stopped, what surprised us was the silence. The silence deafened us. Suddenly, we heard birds singing”, recalls former CFDT trade unionist Édouard Martin, a figure in the fight against the closure of the site.
A few hundred meters away, the “P6” tower, the sixth blast furnace in the town of Patural, still dominates the Fensch valley, the centuries-old heart of Lorraine’s steel industry.
On April 24, 2013, gas supplies were cut off at P6 and its neighbor P3, the last two blast furnaces at Lorraine still in operation. For almost two years, these facilities have not produced cast iron. At the end of 2018, the cessation of activity will be officially definitive.
ArcelorMittal employs 2,200 people
If it stopped its blast furnaces, ArcelorMittal maintained other activities in Florange, where it employs more than 2,200 people dedicated to the production of steel used mainly in the automotive industry.
As a result, ten years later, the local economy has recovered fairly well from the shock, helped by a boom in neighboring Luxembourg, where some 120,000 cross-border workers go to work every day.
“It’s not Byzantium, but it’s fine”, summarizes Michel Liebgott, president of the PS of the urban community of Val de Fensch, who notes “a fairly positive dynamic since the closure of the blast furnaces”, an unemployment rate just above the national average and the creation of companies on the rise.
“Florange’s trauma, no one talks about it anymore,” he said.
“All Reclassified”
The stoppage of the facilities had weighed down the first months of the presidency of François Hollande, who, shortly before his election in 2012, had harangued the steelworkers from the roof of a van.
Once in power, his government had to resolve at the end of 2012 to close.
If ArcelorMittal had committed at the time to invest 180 million euros in Florange, 10 years later the figure reaches 350 million, underlines François Hollande.
Among ArcelorMittal employees, “there was not a single layoff,” admits Édouard Martin, although the same cannot be said of subcontractors. In addition to the employees who left due to early retirement, “everyone has been reclassified.”
“People are doing quite well, the factory is working,” admits the former union member, who became an MEP until 2019. Although he has not yet recovered from the economic “disorder” caused by the closure of the site.
“The Depths of the Earth”
If some residents have circulated a petition to keep industrial architecture in the landscape, demolition of the century-old site is on the agenda. But decontamination has not started.
ArcelorMittal has signed a sale agreement with Henry Invest, a subsidiary of Oxytec, a group present in Luxembourg, Belgium and Lorraine, for the deconstruction of the facilities, which total 180 hectares.
Oxytec plans to buy around 40 hectares for 500,000 euros, before reselling them after five years to local authorities, group chief Patrick Henry told AFP.
“The soils will be decontaminated for future industrial use,” adds the contractor, specifying that the soils will be excavated up to six meters deep, before being filled with “clean soil.”
But the contamination reaches much deeper depths, Édouard Martin estimates. “The foundations are as deep as the height of the blast furnaces. There has been oil and chemicals that have penetrated for more than 100 years in the depths of the earth.
According to him, “there are millions of m3 of land to be cleared.” “Mittal has already said that he will not do it,” adds the ex-unionist, for whom the bill for a complete cleanup would amount to “hundreds of millions of euros.”
An exhibition park project
“Nobody really knows what’s in the ground,” agrees Michel Liebgott.
For the agglomeration community, “missing a good deal” such as a land sale is out of the question, given the lack of land in the region.
“Before, nobody was interested in our industrial wastelands. Today, everyone is interested in them”, observes the councilor, who dreams of seeing an exhibition park built, among other things, instead of the stoves.
This mountain of scrap could represent some 60,000 tons of metal, according to the Oxytec boss, or a loot of 24 million euros in resale. Half of the sum will be donated to ArcelorMittal if the price of steel remains above 350 euros per tonne.
These amounts arouse fears with Fabien Engelmann, RN mayor of Hayange, a town where most of the blast furnaces are located. The latter fears that Henry Invest will go bankrupt after recovering the proceeds from the sale of metals.
“Once this treasure is sold, who will pay for the cleanup?” He asks.
Fabien Engelmann sent a gentle appeal to the prefect of Moselle asking him to block the sale of the land, so that the state assumes direct responsibility for the decontamination of the site.
Not far from Florange, a milder decontamination is taking place at the foot of another blast furnace left for history at Uckange. There, it is the plants that slowly absorb the metals present in the soil.
Source: BFM TV
