Gadgetory

it's strangely quiet you see these red signs with the skull on them but you'll be walking you know within one foot of a landmine they would say you know this thing goes off everybody dies everyone has been affected by landmines in Angola it's ever-present Angola is one of the most heavily mined areas still in the world so he went to Angola to take a look at the technology behind landmine removal they were picked up in an armored Land Rover by halo trust we've been here but since 1994 whilst the war was going on and people were suffering right the way through to the present day when people are still suffering our focus is to get the mines out the ground and Golan's refer to as the end of the earth because my bow is a place of huge importance to angolans as a major battle that was fought the height of the Cold War Angolans confronted apartheid in South Africa at that time mine laying was a normal method of warfare we call the mind town in Africa a lot of the really high-tech stuff is in the surveying process a big tool is Google Earth the way it works is first they'll send out a team of surveyors still talk to townspeople about where these mines are go clock in GPS points to create a map this map of cuido kind of all shows how the whole town is surrounded by gigantic minefields they're still nearby like a big l-shaped minefield it's 30 kilometers long that is just sitting there to take out a land mine is really grueling and tense work people are kneeling on the ground they have a bucket of tools there on their hands and knees with a handheld metal detector kind of slowly moving across this piece of wood it's literally inch by inch they hear any sounds of metal they start excavating what we do now is excavate a trench this shape 20 centimeters wide down to 15 centimeters and when I get to 15 centimeters then I'll move forwards scraping this front wall of my trench the approach is to try to get to the mine from the side because if you touch the top it'll explode the scraping very carefully okay metal on metal okay making me suspicious okay section commander think of an amount when a mine is excavated before it's detonated they're marked with little sticks that are painted red on top and they'll blend minefields we visited there's this red sticks you know every few feet and just one wrong step could be catastrophic in the second minefield there were a bunch of IEDs the people we were with were kind of just like looking down at the mines and like scraping them to see what was on there and that's one of the steak mines and underneath we've got some blocks of TNT this is this a suffocated tank device in this direction to what quit one of our top there was a dense man line around here so they got stuck here take you see this has been absolutely devastated like the totally my wrecked off tracks is being totally torn off we also visited a landmine field that has been completely defined and the city called blombo and that is where Princess Diana walked 20 years ago this year if you look at old pictures of her walking in the field you can see those typical red painted sticks along the side of the road showing where there's land mines and today there's a school there there's homes there's kids playing in the street it's completely different at the halo compound in Huambo they have like basically their office room it's a mapping room and their computers are the countrywide map has has red and green dots all over it showing all the known minefields and the green ones have been cleared of Mines and turned back over to the communities they've done a ton of work but there's still like a lot of work to do currently there's no robots or giant machines that can go within there and just take out all the land mines there's really no silver bullet the main thing is boots on the ground they need people in there doing this exacting slow work today's the last day of the mining in Quetta carnival and unfortunately we're having to close the program after this due to a lack of funding that means that we have to walk away from this minefield which still has many more mines to be cleared and which still presents a risk to the safety of people living in this area