Walking through a minefield

Last Friday I had the unusual experience of walking across what was until recently a minefield. This was part of a public confidence demonstration to celebrate the completion of the demining of the Surf Bay minefield.

As Britain signed up to the Ottowa convention on the clearing of mines in their territories they have committed themselves to clearing the minefields in the Falkland Islands (although they were laid by the Argentinians). As a pilot 2 areas have been cleared this year, one at Sapper Hill and the other at Surf Bay plus small areas at Goose Green and Fox Bay which were fenced off because of the possibility of unexploded ordinance.


A team of 37 deminers from Zimbabwe arrived in October and we got to know some of them well as they came to our church. They were joined for a while by a smaller group from Lebanon.


I think the job proved a lot harder and took a lot longer than expected, particularly at Surf Bay.
They had plans drawn by the Argentine engineers who laid the mines and these proved to be very accurate. (They had been expecting to be removing them themselves when they won the conflict!) The mines were laid in rows within blocks or panels and at Surf Bay there were alternate anti-personel and anti-vehicle mines within the rows.


Searching for the mines is a very painstaking operation. Each mine has only 2 very small pieces of metal on it and so are not easy to detect with metal detectors. From the perimeter fence the deminers clear a number of paths into the minefield until they reach the first row of mines. They then start clearing along the row. The paths are marked out with string and coloured posts and different coloured markers put where each mine was found. Unfortunately I can't find the photos that I took of the area during clearance.

The surface vegetation is carefully removed. The dense fern and diddle dee plants, particularly at Sapper Hill proved very challenging. Then the soil is gradually removed with a trowel. When a layer has been removed they then check again with the metal detectors.

When a mine is discovered it is partially exposed and marked. At the end of work on alternate days the exposed mines are detonated, sending huge couds of peat, sand and stones high into the air. At Sapper Hill many of the mines were very close to the surface and entangled in the roots of the vegetation. At Surf Bay most were between 20 and 30 cms deep but the panels nearest the beach had been covered by sand dunes since they were laid.


To find these they used a mechanical digger which had a protecting metal grid over the front window of the cab. A Falkland Islander was trained to do the mechanical demining. The deepest mine was under about 6 metres of sand so finding the last mines took a long time and involved moving vast quantities of sand.


The minefield at Surf Bay contained over 1,000 mines, and I was amazed how close together they were. You certainly would not have been able to walk through there without standing on one! Despite having been laid 28 years ago the mines were still all in perfect working order.

At the public confidence demonstration one of the people supervising the project gave a short talk and then the few deminers still on the island walked across the area.


The governor was then invited to walk across before the general public were allowed to. The minefield signs have been removed but the fences are going to be left to allow the areas to regenerate. There are still 113 minefields remaining in the Falkland Islands, varying from quite small areas to huge tracts of land. The area at Surf Bay was one of the densest mined areas and also particularly challenging with the varied terrain.