HALO is making great progress towards the goal of a Mine Free Mozambique. With much to be proud of, our dedicated local staff have recently seen success on many fronts. Working on dense border minefields, they are currently finding and destroying up to 120 mines per day on one minefield alone. This huge mine count is only set to grow as we look to increase our clearance capacity.
A number of mined towers on the Maputo power line have minimum metal anti-personnel mines – their detection is difficult with conventional detectors, compounded by the presence of mineralised soils and electrical interference. At the end of 2013, HALO imported and trialled a new, advanced detector made by Minelab designed for gold detecting. The detector has allowed HALO to successfully find dozens and dozens of the minimum metal mines on the power line saving both in time and cost over other methods of clearance. HALO is the first organisation in the world to be using this detector for mine clearance.
To reach the remote village of Nanchenje, near the Cahora Basa Dam in Tete Province, HALO successfully sent an armoured medium wheeled loader nearly 1,000 miles to clear a small area of deeply buried mines from a dense mine line. The route included a treacherous section across a steep, rocky pass that is impassable except for only the hardiest of off-road vehicles. 800 mines have been found so far.
Also in Tete Province, HALO safely disposed of an aircraft bomb in November that posed a concern and threat to the local community for years. HALO remains the only organisation with the technical expertise in the province, and probably the country, to undertake this work.
HALO is thankful to all our donors in Mozambique, in particular the US Government, and is pleased to assist the National Demining Institute (IND) towards its goal of a Mine Free Mozambique by the end of 2014.
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