Project Phongsali 2011: Equipment rumbles through town known to have bombs. Children dig in uncleared soil.

March 16, 2011
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Week Six

Day Forty

The Lao Construction Consortium (LCC) has earthmovers digging into hillsides that have never been cleared of lethal ordnance. In doing so, the company puts lives at risk. Most of the time, we see the shovels and other heavy equipment out in the countryside with just a few surveyors, flagmen and other workers in the vicinity. It’s small comfort to think that, in the event of an accident, the number of deaths will be limited. But, sometimes small comfort is the only comfort you’re gonna get.

In contrast to the work I’ve observed in the uninhabited countryside, today I witnessed an excavator and crew enter Sop Houn, a place best characterized as a village of 528 people, 96 houses and 58 bomb craters.

As the excavators change the elevation of the road, villagers often find they need fill in front of their homes. They buy soil from the equipment operators but the fill they receive is from uncleared land. Here, children are leveling the land unaware that the soil could contain unexploded ordnance.

Heavy equipment is currently rumbling through Sop Houn in complete disregard of bombs and other ordnance known to be in the area. And… the construction company is performing that work with hundreds of villagers standing, sitting, sleeping, bathing, working, playing nearby. If a big bomb, say a 500 or 750-pounder, detonates in Sop Houn in the middle of a typical day, the loss of life and property could surpass any other accident in post-war Lao history.

Last year our team lived in Sop Houn for six weeks and explored the place in a way that it had never been explored before. We cleared 105 pieces of ordnance from land in and around the village. The smallest was a hand grenade, the largest a 750 pound bomb. I’m proud that we removed all the problem ordnance that villagers had found above ground, but I’m burdened by thoughts of what remains unseen, underground, waiting for a shovel or bulldozer to venture too close: monster machines fated to meet monstrous destruction.

Last year we briefly went beyond our mission of surface clearance and excavated a site within the village that people said held a big bomb. Had that bomb detonated on impact it would have made crater number fifty-nine. Instead, it bored a deep hole that villagers eventually filled in when they leveled the ground to created building sites. When we explored where people suggested we dig, we found the rump end of the bomb about four feet down. To expose the entire bomb we’d have had to dig a hole twelve or fourteen feet deep.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have the staff or resources to render that bomb safe. So… we reluctantly filled in the hole that we’d just dug and left the bomb behind. We cautioned people living nearby to leave the bomb undisturbed until we return with adequate funding to conduct a proper demolition. (That bomb will require special care by special talent and could easily be a $5,000 project!)

In the forty years since American B-52’s bombed Sop Houn, nothing has shaken houses and vibrated the earth like the heavy machinery currently working rumbling through town. Hopefully, the bomb we left behind will withstand that turbulence. But, what about other bombs closer to the roadwork and the big machines?

The construction company has already unearthed a closer bomb– a 750 pounder within the right-of-way and less than 50 yards from several houses. That bomb was the talk of the town for several days but it didn’t slow the construction company. Supervisors had the shovel operator scoop the bomb out of the soil and set it aside so crews could continue to push on through the village.

My dad taught me this lesson about gambling: “In every game, the odds favor the casino. You might be lucky in the short run. Some nights you might win a fortune. But… it’s a mathematical certainty that if you gamble long enough, you will loose all your money.”

The Lao Construction Consortium continues to gamble with people’s lives; so far they’ve won. But… they haven’t won because they’re smart; they’ve just been damn lucky. In the long run, the odds favor the bomb. Eventually a machine will strike the wrong bomb in the wrong place and innocent people will die. When that happens, should the company have the right to call the incident an accident?

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