Oudomsouk village is now a safer place. The 750 is finally gone!
Yesterday we made the village of Oudomsouk a safer place to live. Readers might remember that several months ago I wrote about the 750-pound bomb that was located under a house in the middle of the village. The bomb was discovered a couple of years ago by the homeowner when he was digging a toilet pit. The bomb had been there for a long time. If it was dropped from the last flight of American bombers over Laos at the end of the Indochina War, it has been there for more than thirty years; if it was dropped during America’s first bomb run over Khammuan Province, it may have been there more than forty years. Of course, age doesn’t much determine the level of danger posed by leftover bombs. People still occasionally die in the cities of Europe when bombs, left over from WWII and nearing 70 years of age, explode in accidental detonations.
Today, the “750” is history. Our team called in the police and military, evacuated every person in the village, and then barricaded the roads and cut the electrical power. Every business was closed; every house was empty. If people valued their cows and other livestock, they led them to safety outside the town. Counting out-of-town visitors, shoppers, and assorted onlookers, we had to control the movement of nearly 2,000 people for most of a day.
We took the destructive power of the 750 seriously. Had it exploded, fragments of its steel casing would have flown at ballistic speed for nearly a mile. The house that was sitting over it would have been instantly converted into a mass of flying debris, further endangering people and property. There was universal agreement that the bomb was too dangerous to move. While the front fuse appeared to present little danger, the back fuse — resembling a small thermos bottle jutting out of the end of the bomb — looked to be in workable condition and was the greater concern.
Our technical staff decided that if our de-miners moved carefully, they could do some pick-and-shovel work near the bomb to create better access to it. That call was based on the professional judgment of the best experts at Phoenix Clearance Limited: Des Fuller, Technical Advisor; Paul Stanford, Senior Technical Operations Manager; and Khonsavan Manivong, Field Manager. The collective experience of that team exceeds the oldest possible age of the bomb by twenty years or more. Notably, no one asked for my opinion.
Everyone who had seen and inspected the bomb over the past two years showed it a lot of respect. So much respect, in fact, that they all walked away suggesting that someone else get rid of it soon. While various organizations nominated each other for the job, time passed and the bomb remained where it was found. The village of Oudomsouk was at stake in a bet that lightning wouldn’t strike nearby, that no fire would burn the house above, that no scrap collector would try to dismantle the bomb, and that the homeowner would not implement a do-it-yourself plan of action and attempt to haul the bomb away.
In the months that I have been in Nakai, I’ve eavesdropped on a lot of debate over the best technique to use on the 750. The applicable tricks of the trade go by such names as “The Vulcan,” “The Round Tom,” “The Rocket Wrench,” and the “The Baldric.” When those terms would come up in conversation, I would pester for more information and enjoy hearing the pros evaluate the merits of each strategy. What everyone hoped for was to conduct a “low order” demolition that would employ a minimum level of force to render the bomb harmless. What everyone dreaded was inadvertently conducting a “high order” demolition (or, in laymen’s terms, exploding the bomb and blowing the neighborhood to bits).
When the time for talk was over, Des Fuller, a retired British Royal Navy diver who has worked with unexploded ordnance in Kuwait, Lebanon, Laos, and other hot spots around the world, made the call for the company. Des announced his intention to “Cracker Barrel” the bomb, a technique that employs a small, skillfully directed explosion to shear off an ordnance fuse.
When bombs are detonated, a series of steps occur that lead up to the principal event that we laymen think of as the bomb’s explosion. That series is called the “explosive train.” A detonator explodes in a fuse; that relatively tiny explosion ignites a small booster, which in turn ignites a larger booster that finally ignites the bomb’s main explosive charge. (In the case of the 750, the main charge consists of approximately 350 pounds of TNT.) As the main charge burns, the solid explosive that fills the bomb’s steel casing is converted to gases. When the gases expand to the point that the hardened steel casing can no longer contain the pressure, the casing will blow apart, releasing a powerfully destructive shock wave. Steel fragments from the casing fly at ballistic speed and bombard nearby objects. The shock wave destroys nearby structures and makes projectiles of their parts.
The theory behind the “Cracker Barrel” is that if you can quickly shear the fuse off the casing, the firing of its detonator will do no harm because the fuse will no longer be connected to the bomb. You will have broken the “explosive train” and interrupted the series of steps that ordinarily would cause the bomb to explode. It’s somewhat of a foot race measured in thousandths of a second. If the fuse is successfully knocked off in a timely manner, the good guys win. If the fuse is not properly removed, and the detonator ignites the booster inside the bomb, the good guys lose. Sadly, in this business when the good guys lose, a lot of people and property can get hurt. A big bomb is not selfish; it shares misery all around.
The term “Cracker Barrel” comes from the appearance of the shaped charge that is used to blast the fuse off the bomb. It could hardly be a simpler construction. The heart of the device is a plate of hardened steel about the size of a deck of cards; the steel plate must be harder than the metal casing of the fuse. The steel plate is glued onto a block of wood that serves as a spacer. It could be that the thickness of the spacer was determined through complicated mathematical calculations and a careful consideration of the principles of physics, or it could be that the thickness of the wood was determined by the dimensions of the scrap lumber that the inventor had lying around in his basement. In any case, on top of the wood spacer, our guys tape a block of TNT.
The plan hinges on using the proper amount of TNT, something like 200 grams. (Do not attempt this at home. The staff at Phoenix Clearance Limited are highly trained professionals.) The plan is to create enough force to drive the steel plate through the fuse, shearing it completely off, but not so great a force that the explosion might ignite the explosive fill within the bomb. It takes a little imagination, but the sandwich formed by stacking the steel plate, the TNT, and the block of wood together does slightly resemble the metal band and staves of an old-fashioned cracker barrel.
Oudomsouk is a village without a newspaper. Few residents have a radio and fewer still a television. News travels by word of mouth here, and the local market is the central hub of all communication. So for two days prior to the demolition, our teams made megaphone announcements all over town alerting residents and shoppers that the town would be closed down for several hours on the coming Sunday afternoon. We compiled a list of all the handicapped and elderly people in the village. Then we made house-to-house visits and worked out plans for the evacuation of anyone who could not travel on their own. Typical of the challenges were carrying a fragile 97-year-old woman to safety, and helping a father persuade his terrified mentally-disabled daughter to leave their home and join the exodus out of town.
For homeowners living closest to the bomb, we sent workers and trucks to move the entire contents of their homes out of harm’s way. People who lived farther from the epicenter of the action had to use their own resources if they chose to evacuate possessions. We saw a surprising number of families leave all their other belongings behind while they carted their refrigerator to safety.
The demolition came off with hardly a hitch. Our steel plate cleanly sliced the back fuse off the bomb, and the explosive charge that propelled it did no more damage to the house above than rattle the floor boards and knock a few pieces of siding loose from the outer wall. Within an hour of the blast, residents were swarming back into town and the owners of the nearest homes were moving possessions back into place. Hundreds of people came to the site of the blast to inspect the disabled bomb. I suspect that many of the curious children who came for a peek had heard about the bomb for years, but had been forbidden to venture close to its resting place.
Des Fuller, who had more to do with the success of the operation than anyone else, dodged publicity as best he could and appeared uncomfortable to have residents congratulating him and offering their thanks. He reminded me of the legendary “Lone Ranger” from the television series of my youth: the masked hero who would come to the rescue, save the day, and then modestly slip out of town before anyone could thank him. (“Hi-yo Silver, away!”)
While the bomb was still in the hole under the house, Des unscrewed its back plate and removed the booster that sat inside the casing. Now, a day later, all that remains to be done is to lift the bomb from the hole, load it onto a truck, and haul it well out of the village to a site where we can burn away hundreds of pounds of TNT. It will be heavy lifting, but it will no longer be life-threatening work. The 750 is history, and Oudomsouk is a safer place.