Laos: 

 

 

                

     Cluster bomb poster and fragment of 750 pound bomb at the MAG museum, Phonsavan, Laos.

 

                             

    A "live" and deadly UXO bomblet or "bombie" (BLU-26) from a cluster bomb (CBU-26) found in a corn field, some twenty meters from a house, when I visited a small village near Phonsavan, Laos.

    Millions of bomblets failed to arm (arming was accomplished by the rotation of the bomblet and an arming flap which activated a timer) and explode upon impact, as designed, and remain a threat to the local peoples, especially farmers and curious children.

  A single cluster bomb contains 670 bomblets; it is estimated that between 80 to 90 million bomblets were dropped in Laos during the war.  An estimated 30% of the bomblets failed to arm and detonate.  Each bomblet contains some 300 ball bearing-shaped spheres, that upon detonation are propelled over an area of  several hundred square meters. One bomblet can produce as many as 200,000 deadly shards of flying iron upon explosion.   

  Shaped like a ball or toy and looking familar to children, it can be deadly if touched or played with. A farmer tilling the soil with a shovel or hoe can arm and explode the device by accident, thus killing or maiming.  Even nearly 50 years after the Vietnam War UXO kills.

             

  This is the family living within a stone`s throw of the Bombie, shown above, in the corn field.  I hope that they teach their children well about the dangers of playing in the area and to not play with "strange-looking" toys.   Even a walk into the field and surrounding area is extremely dangerous.

                 

   Cluster bomb casing and conventional bomb fragment in the front yard of an old lady`s house (right). 

 Bomb crater at the Plain of Jars Site 1 (left).

                   

 Looking down at craters and the Jars Site 1, near Phonsavan, Laos (left).            Crater close-up (right).

                   

  Another view of a bomb crater at the Plain of Jars Site 1 (left).  Photo of the Jars at Site 1 (right).

    

             Lao boys sitting on the largest jar of Site 1. 

WIKIPEDIA: Archeaology, history and information about the sites.

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Legacies of War was created to raise awareness about the history of the Vietnam War-era bombing in Laos, to provide space for healing the wounds of war and to create greater hope for a future of peace.

 

 

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http://www.mcc.org/us/co 

 

Unexploded ordnance --UXO

Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexploded_ordnance 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Unexploded ordnance worldwide
Unexploded ordnance from at least as far back as the First World War still poses a hazard worldwide, both in former combat areas and on military firing ranges. A major problem with unexploded ordnance is that over the years the detonator and main charge deteriorate, frequently making them more sensitive to disturbance, and therefore more dangerous to handle. There are countless examples of civilians tampering with unexploded ordnance that is many years old - often with fatal results. Believing it to be harmless they handle the device and it explodes, killing or severely injuring them. For this reason it is universally recommended that unexploded ordnance should not be touched or handled by unqualified persons. Instead, the location should be reported to the local police so that EOD professionals can render it safe.

Europe

In the Ardennes region of France, large-scale citizen evacuations were necessary during UXO removal operations in 2001. In the forests of Verdun French government "demineurs" working for the Department du Deminage still hunt for poisonous, volatile, explosive munitions and recover about 900 tons every year. The most feared are corroded artillery shells containing chemical warfare agents such as mustard gas. According to the film "Aftermath", these demineurs "have gathered more than twenty million shells but have lost six hundred demineurs. At the current speed, France will be fully cleared and safe - in seven hundred years." French farmers still find many UXOs when ploughing their fields; the so-called "iron harvest."


German artillery shell from WWI (1914-1918) left beside a field for disposal by the army in 2004 near Ieper in Belgium. Live and dangerous.A dramatic example of the threat of UXO is the wreck of the SS Richard Montgomery off the coast of Kent, which still contains 3000 tons of munitions. When a similar World War II wreck, the Polish Kielce exploded in 1967, it produced an earth tremor measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale.

The United States of America

According to US Environmental Protection Agency documents released in late 2002, UXO at 16,000 domestic inactive military ranges within the United States pose an "imminent and substantial" public health risk and could require the largest environmental cleanup ever, at a cost of at least $14 billion. Some individual ranges cover 500 square miles (1,300 km²), and, taken together, the ranges comprise an area the size of Florida.

In addition to the obvious danger of explosion, buried UXO also entails the risk of environmental contamination. In some heavily-used military training areas, munitions-related chemicals such as explosives and perchlorate (a component of pyrotechnics and rocket fuel) can enter soil and groundwater. A prominent example exists at the Massachusetts Military Reservation (MMR) on Cape Cod, Massachusetts (USA), where decades of artillery training has contaminated the only drinking water for thousands of surrounding residents. An expensive UXO recovery effort is under way there.
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UXO Safety Video:

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--used for target practice in WWII because it resembles parts of Italy http://gorp.away.com/gorp/resource/us_national_forest/wv/ds_ordn.htm

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An excellent article written by Robert Verish.

Meteorite-Times.com - Bob's Findings - June 2006
Article - UXO - If you scour the desert searching for
meteorites as much as me, you no doubt have
encountered one of these UXO - also known as "Duds”.
http://meteorite-recovery.tripod.com/2006/jun06.htm

 

The country of Laos has the distinction of being the world's most heavily bombed nation. During the period of the American Vietnam War, over half-a-million bombing missions dropped more than 5 million tons of ordnance on Laos, most of it anti-personnel cluster bombs. Each cluster bomb shell contained hundreds of individual bomblets, "bombies", about the size of a tennis ball. An estimated 30% of these munitions did not detonate. Ten of the 18 Laotian provinces have been described as "severely contaminated" with artillery and mortar shells, mines, rockets, grenades, and other devices from various countries of origin. These munitions pose a continuing obstacle to agriculture and a special threat to children, who are attracted by the toy-like devices.

Lebanon

In the aftermath of the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, it is estimated that southern Lebanon is littered with[1] one million undetonated cluster bombs - approximately 1.5 bombs per Lebanese inhabitant of the region, dropped by Israeli Defense Forces in the[2] last days of the war.


The United Kingdom
A British NCO prepares to dispose of an unexploded bomb, during the First World War.UXO is standard terminology in the UK, although in artillery, especially on practice ranges, an unexploded shell is referred to as a blind, and during the Blitz in WWII an unexploded bomb was referred to as an UXB. Most current UXO risk is limited to areas, mainly in London, that were subject to the Blitz and to land used by the military to store ammunition or to train on. British textbook of Explosives .pdf (Technical reference book not Instruction manual).


Detection technology
Modern techniques can combine geophysical and survey methods with modern electromagnetic and magnetic detectors. This provides digital mapping of UXO contamination with the aim to better target subsequent excavations, reducing the cost of digging on every metallic contact and speeding the clearance process. Magnetometer probes can detect UXO and provide geotechnical data before drilling or piling is carried out.

UXO removal

Currently in the U.S., the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP), and Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP), Department of Defense programs fund research into not only the detection, but also discrimination of UXO from scrap metal. Much of the cost of UXO removal comes from removing non-explosive items that the metal-detectors identified, so improved discrimination is critical. New techniques such as shape reconstruction from magnetic data and better de-noising techniques (to name a few) will prove invaluable to reducing cleanup costs and enhancing recovery.

 

For Links, Photos from Wikipedia see:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UXO