From Prodders to Flails, Demining Embraces New Discoveries

It's sharp. It's shiny. It's about 30 cm long and it fits in the hand. Costing $1.48, the humble prodder, pointed like a knitting needle and used to probe for mines, is a deminer's best friend, but it's not his only friend. More and better tools are emerging to make the deminer's work faster, safer and more effective.

"For five years the evolution up here has been unbelievable; that's the thing, demining is constantly evolving," said Paul Haslop, Cambodia country director for Halo Trust, a demining charity headquartered in Britain. Like other demining groups, Halo Trust has pioneered new and better procedures to help its deminers cover more ground more quickly.

Halo is clearing a number of sites in Siam Reap. At one site running along a road the brushcutter has leveled the scrubby bushes and the men clearing lanes work in a large patch of ground laid bare. At another nearby site the men are hand-cutting through a 3 hectare forest of small trees because the ground is too soft from the recent rains to use the brushcutter.

Bin Mao, the site's field officer, said his men clear twice as fast by using the brushcutter: 15 square meters a day instead of seven. Without the cutter, he said, "it is difficult, it is very slow."

This grindingly tedious routine is a Halo innovation, a technique known as OMOL, or One-Man-One-Lane. Accepted practice has been for two-person teams, with one deminer sweeping for ordnance and one using the prod when the sweeper registers a suspicious object. Halo introduced OMOL at the beginning of 1998 and in doubling the number of lanes demined with the same manpower, says it has raised productivity by 150 percent. With only 450 staff in the field, Halo runs 360 lanes. By contrast, a typical CMAC platoon of 29 men will be working 12 lanes.

CMAC conducted a study of OMOL in mid-1998 but decided not to make the switch, said a CMAC official.

At Halo, the introduction of the OMOL technique made some deminers unhappy, said Bin Mao, the site field officer. "Before, they worked a half hour and [took a] break for half an hour. Now there's only 10 minutes break," he said.

Concerns about short break times don't stop at Halo deminers. CMAC expects to have two six-dog marking teams in operation by the end of the year and dogs are particularly susceptible to overwork.

With sensitive noses trained to sniff out the explosives in mines, dogs should help solve one of demining’s biggest problems: how to identify the area of a suspected minefield where the explosives actually are. A marked minefield is very often a full 200 percent bigger than the actual mined area, said John Dingley, a CMAC adviser working with survey teams.

A marking team of 20 men and six dogs can theoretically cover an area that would normally absorb the efforts of three platoons with a total of 87 men, said Dingley. CMAC has 60 29-man platoons.

At the CMAC training center in Kampong Chhnang a group of dogs and handlers are running through their final drills. Selection will be in October to decide which of the trainee man-and-dog teams will become operational at the end of the year. Each team has been training together for one year.

The men and dogs are practicing a drill with buried mines that have had the detonators removed. They first carve a small meter-wide path inside the mined area, which simulates a corner of a real suspected minefield. Then ropes are laid across the square.

The dogs follow the ropes across the square without their trainers, sniffing up one side and down the other. Each handler stands and encourages his dog from the safe area outside the box.

The dogs have never been used before in Cambodia. One handler, Nit Korm, a 30-year-old former mine-detector operator, is a little nervous about operating with his dog, Mara. "There's still not confidence yet," he said, "because we need experience with each other." He said he expects they will be ready in another few months.

Dogs are expensive, up to $20,000 on the open market according to the Swedish trainers. And they get overheated easily. But the biggest problem is that the training takes time, patience, and a huge practice area, where "safe" mines can be buried for months so the giveaway human smells are lost before the dogs are set to find them again.

Three more six-dog marking units will begin work in March, for a total of five. CMAC estimates it needs five to ten times that number.

"We're years away from being able to supply [a dog to] everyone who needs a dog," said Dingley, the survey adviser. Other tools are becoming available for both demining and surveying minefields. One, the flail, initially came to Cambodia to do area reduction, the same task the dogs perform. But it has now has a new use, to roughly clear a minefield and make it easier for manual deminers to work.

A flail costs $700,000, CMAC's pair was donated by the Finnish government. It is a truck-like machine with a drum on one end with chains attached to the drum. As the drum revolves the chains strike the ground, and heavy metal hammers at the end of the chain break up mines and cause them to detonate.

After 6 months of trials the Finns say the flail destroys 80 percent of the mines, while also cutting up any vegetation on the minefield. "It's safer and faster than manual demining," said Kimmo Kulonen, the Finnish team leader. Operations are to begin at the end of the year.

Finding the mines remains of paramount importance, and some methods have met with more success than others. Differential GPS (global positioning system) will allow marking teams to calculate the minefields' location precisely to within 2 meters, which would mark a major advance upon than the 150-meter standard offered by regular GPS.

But another innovation, Ground Penetrating Radar, has not been met with much enthusiasm by deminers in its trials in Cambodia. "The problem right now is with the processing speed," said Halo's Haslop.

A key factor in the evolution of techniques and equipment is the willingness of organizations to learn and borrow from each other. "There is a great deal of cooperation," said Haslop. The concept of One-Man-One-Lane originally came from Mozambique, he pointed out.

Next year in Battambang, CMAC will create a quick-response mobile platoon which aims to respond to community request. This program will be a mirror of the Mines Advisory Group’s teams that respond quickly to calls from villages where mines have been located. Haslop said he believes the improvements will continue. "There is so much thinking about how to get the maximum impact out of the relatively low amount of donor dollars," he said. "The men with the bayonet in their teeth have gone home."

By Douglas Grindle