#unexploded bombs

Explosive Hazard Awareness Cards for Ukraine

A new project aims to increase unexploded ordnance hazard awareness with playing cards comes from Fenix Insight and Cold War Collectables who kindly sent me a pack. Each card features a photograph and designation of various ordnance ranging from small arms, grenades, RPGs, anti-tank mines to cluster munitions, Grad rockets and air dropped thermobaric bombs. 

Check out my video below for further details:

From the fundraising page:

“The war in Ukraine has left vast quantities of abandoned and unexploded ordnance (bombs, grenades, landmines, missiles, rockets, shells etc) scattered across the country. These munitions pose a major risk to everybody living and working there, including local people, aid workers and soldiers. Awareness cards can help save lives.“

What would take a JMU student to Vietnam in the middle of his senior year? Cory Rahman (’16) got the opportunity to aid mine action organizations in Vietnam with using geographic information systems (GIS) technology in their processes for clearing explosive remnants of war (ERW) hazards in the country. This hands-on application of geography to a real-world application provided both a tremendous learning opportunity for Rahman, as well as important service to the Vietnamese people. His work on humanitarian GIS was made possible by JMU’s Center for International Stabilization and Recovery (CISR) and JMU Geographic Science faculty through a project sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.

As a result of the Vietnam War, the country is contaminated with unexploded ordnance (UXO), including cluster munitions. Local and international organizations partner with the Vietnamese government to neutralize the effects of war and support post-conflict recovery and development by training local staff to clear these explosive hazards that are a threat to civilians. A key aspect to safely clearing villages and countryside of these explosive hazards is to have clearly mapped knowledge of the extent and degree of contamination.

Rahman and ISAT Professor Paul Rittenhouse spent a week in Vietnam with CISR’s associate director, Dr. Suzanne Fiederlein, collaborating with local teams to develop an ArcGIS Online survey tool to map cluster munition contamination.

... In the post-Cold War years—1989, 1999—the largest refugee population in the world were Afghanis and Pakistanis. They were being blown up by the thousands,” says Ken Rutherford, a professor of political science at James Madison University and the director of the Center for International Stabilization and Recovery. “What we’re talking about is a weapon of mass destruction that moves in slow motion.”

So began efforts to launch the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. The group organized a Mine Ban Treaty that called for banning the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of antipersonnel land mines and required countries to destroy their stockpiles, clear affected areas of mines, and assist victims. Rutherford, who is himself a bilateral lower leg amputee due to a near-fatal land mine injury he sustained in 1993 in Somalia, played a role in bringing the treaty to fruition.

“For a year I really believed my story was kind of different and odd, a freak accident,” Rutherford says of the period immediately after he was injured. “I’m a Colorado boy, I’m telling people and they don’t believe it and I don’t believe it. But my story wasn’t unique, it wasn’t special at all. The real strange thing is so many people were being maimed and killed and nobody was writing about it.”

When the final draft of the treaty was written in 1997, over 120 countries became signatories; now, 162 have signed it, including all countries in the Western Hemisphere except Cuba and the United States. The U.S. is a leader in combating land mines, Rutherford says, and was the first country to permanently ban the export of land mines. The refusal to sign the treaty comes down to North Korea; if North Korean forces invade South Korea, the U.S. wants to be able to deter an invasion with the weapons of our choice.

“I’m proud of our country that we [support demining and help victims], but I’m not so proud because there are a lot of countries that look to the U.S. for leadership,” Rutherford says.

The Mines Advisory Group (MAG) has launched an innovative project with Facebook and the US government to help people in northern Iraq learn how to stay safe from the landmines and unexploded bombs left behind after years of war.

The initiative uses Facebook's advertising tools to deliver simple graphics to at-risk groups describing how to recognise dangers, how to stay safe if an explosive device is discovered, and how to alert the authorities to the problem. The pilot project, which will run until November 2019, will target users living in Ninewa, a governorate in northern Iraq that is home to 2.5 million people. 

“More than 40 years after the Vietnam war ended, unexploded ordnance still litters Quang Tri province – providing a source of income for some. At least 8,500 people have died from bomb explosions since the conflict concluded in 1975. One in three were metal collectors.”

Quang Tri is Vietnam’s worst-hit province, according to the Technology Centre for Bomb and Mine Disposal in Hanoi. More than four-fifths of its 474,600 hectares are polluted with explosive war remnants. Despite decades of clean-up efforts, there are still more than 400,000 pieces of UXO believed to be buried deep in the ground, according to Project Renew, a government-backed body that conducts mine clearance and education programmes in Quang Tri.”

“One reason for the high casualty rate among scrap collectors is the inferior equipment they use.Hien Xuan Ngo, communications and development manager of Project Renew, says villagers typically cobble together their devices using cheap parts. In contrast, Project Renew’s bomb disposal teams use quality metal detectors imported from Australia and Germany at the cost of “hundreds to thousands of dollars”.

In Quang Tri, scrap metal collection remains very much a part of life and a source of tragedy. Some hope that as the province develops, with new economic and industrial zones, fewer will have to do the risky work. Truc’s five children escaped becoming scrap metal collectors like their parents and neighbours. All found jobs in the city and send home money every month.

South China Morning Post, June 2019: “For scrap metal collectors, US-Vietnam war bombs are still a source of life and death,” by Natalie Choy                       

South China Morning Post, June 9, 2019: “44 years after war with US, Vietnam has an all-women team searching for unexploded bombs,” by Khairul Anwar  

Technology Centre for Bomb and Mine Disposal Engineering Command (BOMICEN)  

By Rick Noack, Washington Post, April 20, 2018

BERLIN--Other countries may have hurricanes, blizzards or flooding that regularly shut down major transport hubs. Germany, meanwhile, is still dealing with the legacy of a war the country launched itself: thousands of unexploded bombs, hidden beneath one of Europe’s busiest cities in a nation now at peace.

Germany’s main railway station in Berlin was forced to shut down on Friday in preparation for the defusing of one such a bomb, as authorities evacuated parts of the capital’s city center until early afternoon local time.

The 1,000-pound, British-made bomb was successfully defused. Train services have since resumed, and workers are being allowed back into the city center, but it may not be long until the next large-scale evacuation here.

As many as 50,000 bombs were dropped onto Berlin by the Allied forces in an effort to destroy the city, and about a fifth of those bombs are believed to have never detonated.

Berlin may have turned into a hipster’s paradise with cheap cafes and quiet parks since World War II, but the discovery of deadly war remnants keeps reminding people here of the rubble on which this city was built. Usually, the bombs are discovered at construction sites, and some of them are still live and could explode.

In a perverse case of symmetry, the other European country most affected by this problem was Germany’s opponent in the war, Britain, whose capital city, London, was on the receiving end of thousands of German bombs earlier in the war.

Researchers have only recently started to delve into historical documents to track down areas that were disproportionately bombed in an effort to warn construction companies which zones are high-risk. But amid the lack of a coordinated cross-European initiative, such projects remain limited in scope, and have so far covered only London. No similar projects are known to exist in Berlin, even though their absence may eventually cost lives.

One construction worker died in the city of Euskirchen six years ago when he dug into a World War II explosive without noticing it. Two years earlier, in June 2010, three bomb disposal workers were killed when a bomb they were trying to defuse in the German city of Göttingen suddenly exploded.

That’s why German authorities cleared all buildings within a 2,600 feet radius from the site where the Berlin bomb was found on Friday. Ministries, embassies, a hospital and the city’s bustling main station were emptied, and planes flying into or out of the city changed their routes to avoid the airspace above the bomb site.

Having your flight rerouted because of a World War II era bomb isn’t unique to Germany. After a German bomb was discovered at London’s King George V Dock near the central City Airport in February, the terminal was closed for an entire day. The bomb was eventually recovered from the bottom of the Thames river and detonated at a secure location off the coast of England, as defusing it would have been too risky.

Officials estimate that more than 50 million World War II bombs, detonators and shells still lie on the bottom of the Baltic and North Seas.

Even though hundreds of fishermen have been injured after pulling up shells or detonators from the ground, European authorities still lack a coordinated plan to tackle the threat.

While the bomb defused in Berlin on Friday was dropped with the intent to cause destruction, the weapons that now cover the bottom of European waters were mostly deliberately dumped there during or after the war. At the time, it appeared to be the safest solution to both the Allied forces and the Nazis. Some 70 years later, however, the lethal explosives keep washing up on Europe’s beaches or are being pulled into fishing boats. Some of those shells may still contain deadly nerve agents.

One substance, white phosphorus, regularly washes up on the German island of Rügen, where tourists or amber collectors have accidentally picked up pieces of the toxic material in recent years. The substance that caused some of the most horrifying injuries during the Vietnam War can make a victim’s skin melt away. Even briefly touching the substance can cause severe organ damage.

Both on land and in the sea, the delayed impact of Europe’s World War II legacy may not have reached its peak. As shells are rusting away in the North and Baltic Seas, toxic chemicals may begin to leak near popular beaches.