Since 1988, the HALO Trust has been working to rid the world of unrecovered landmines that maim or kill more than 15,000 people annually – with 20 percent of their victims being children.
Thousands of employees use metal detectors first to locate the mines and then dig them out by hand. In some instances, large crushing devices are also used.
Although the process is slow and dangerous, it’s usually productive. That is until the organization started to come across fields with wet, sticky soil and anti-personnel mines made of plastic. This combo not only made the mines hard to find but extremely difficult to access and destroy.
That was until UK-based Mining Machinery Developments got involved. The company builds mining equipment, so it has experience in designing digging machines that can be used on a wide variety of soil types and in making big rocks into small ones.
HALO reached out to the company, and it responded by donating one of their current vehicles and offering to build a new, scaled-down machine that would be easier to deploy to minefields around the world.
The development of the new machine took more than six years, but the 30-ton unit was delivered to HALO last month. It’s currently going through field testing with hopes of full deployment by the end of the year.
The machine can chew through 50 tons of rock and soil every hour thanks to two sets of rotating steel teeth called sizers. The spacing, speed, and dimensions of the sizers had to be adjusted in order to ensure that the soil and rocks HALO encounters will be broken down to a size small enough that it couldn’t include an undetonated mine.
The sizers also had to be durable enough to withstand the five ounces of high explosive that detonates when these teeth start tearing through them. Although this is enough power to seriously hurt or kill a person, these explosions are absorbed without issue by the MMD machine.
It’s believed that the new unit could destroy as many as 100,000 mines by 2025.