Transcript
CASSANDRA MCKEOWN: A lot of the sea mines have sort of washed ashore and we have been able to remove a lot of those. The recent task we completed was actually an ammunition barge that had been sunk during World War Two so it was just there complete with all the ordnance still sitting on it - some eight and a half tonnes.
DON WISEMAN: So you are clearing mines that have washed up?
CMcK: We are clearing all sorts of ordnance actually, from grenades up to 2000 pound bombs so we have just passed the milestone of 50,000 so that has been a huge range of all ordnance.
DW: 50,000 pieces right across Palau?
CMcK: That's right, in all 16 states. The main battle was down on Peleliu, so the vast majority was on Peleliu. That's on land and in the sea, obviously.
DW: What do you do to it? How do you render it harmless? What do you have to do to this ordnance?
CMcK: Part of our programme here is capacity training Palauans so that we can leave a sustainable skill here, because they are still finding bombs in England. They will forever be finding bombs. So we are leaving a skill - what we would call 'render safe' so often called diffusing. So we will diffuse the bombs to make them safe to transport. And we store them until we get a critical mass when we do an explosive demolition of the ordnance. That way everything is vapourised and has the best environmental impact that way.
DW: You have got a spot on Peleliu where you can explode all these bombs?
CMcK: Yes, yes we have yes. Well quite a way from Peleliu. It is a small island on the outside that the government and the chiefs allocated to us every few months.
DW: You are receiving some funding from the New Zealand aid programme.
CMcK: We are, we are, kindly out of their Hawaiian embassy.
DW: In terms of training you provide for locals, what do you do? How do you train someone to be involved in diffusing bombs or rendering bombs safe?
CMcK: It is quite a skill. I think some of our workers have been with us since day one eight years ago. Some of them are actually highly skilled. In our industry there are different levels - it's called EOD, Explosive Ordnance Disposal, and there are recognised levels up from one to four, so our boys, some of them have trained up to two at the moment - and girls - and then obviously huge experience. We have expatriate bomb technicians that supervise what they are doing. But it's great, over the last eight years they have been able to take on more responsibility and a lot of the tasks. So you know they can go out and remove bombs that people find in their gardens and things like that. I think was is also interesting out here is, because the bombs are 73 years old they are in a really nasty state of deterioration. So they are leaking all those sort of toxic chemicals out. So even worse than the ones you will find today in Afghanistan because it is all leaking and distorted and even more volatile.
DW: So it is even more critical now than it's ever been.
CMcK: Yes and our guys are very well experienced. Not a lot of people have experience with WW2 ordnance but now that we are over 50,000 they are quite experts in the field which is great.
