The Pen | Jan Huijbers

Our future sands are blocked by 900,000 sea mines

When in 1998 the military reduced the manpower available for OCE (conventional explosives detection) work, the government transferred this task to the market. This gave rise to a civil branch in the detection of explosives in earthworks, in which our hydraulic engineering company also played a role. Together with colleague companies, defense and Internal Affairs, our company helped to draw up the BRL, the Assessment Guideline. Nowadays we talk about WSCS-OCE, however, the work remains the same: we detect conventional explosives, approach them and secure everything. Then it's up to the EOD (explosive ordnance disposal service) to defuse or detonate the explosive in a controlled manner. Whereas the Netherlands has mainly explosives from the Second World War in the ground, Belgium has mainly explosives from the First World War. Enough to work with our company full-time with approximately 40 employees every day in OCE.

With offices in the Netherlands and Belgium, we create risk maps that can be used to bypass explosives during operations. Our engineers are specialists in risk assessment. We employ historians who have knowledge of the use of explosives in the First and Second World Wars and have a growing archive of information and visual material. As many as 400,000 aerial photographs in this archive indicate the locations of fronts, impact craters, gun turrets and trenches.  On a daily basis, two staff members are actively populating information in a GIS system, creating an important source of information used for OCE recommendations. In the field, when locating CE, it is important to take the right control measures to manage the risks to personnel and the environment. When a suspected dud needs to be excavated to a depth of up to 12 meters, civil engineering knowledge of soil conditions, water management and environmental factors is particularly important. Clearing by the EOD may require entire areas to be evacuated. In short, OCE work can be very drastic for the environment.

The striking thing is that today, 74 years after World War II, there is still no standards framework established. We are still in discussions with the government to structure it. However, the need to clear explosives is no longer limited to individual construction activities that need to be carried out safely. Rising sea levels are requiring more and more sand to be sprayed on. Consider that there are more than 900,000 sea mines in the North Sea alone, among other categories of explosives. Roughly divided into 300,000 pieces from World War I and 600,000 from World War II, these sea mines are an absolute obstacle in sand mining. Each piece of munitions we have to navigate around makes a difference of, on average, as much as 35,000 cubic meters of sand! When we do the math, the 900,000 sea mines alone stand in the way of extracting 31.5 billion cubic meters of sand. Sand that we will urgently need in the future to protect us from rising sea levels. That is why I advocate that the industry sit down with the government to see how we can clear the North Sea floor for sand extraction. Let's start rewarding the fishing industry again, just like in the old days, by giving them compensation for every piece of ammunition turned in. That will prevent people from throwing ammunition back overboard after being caught, in places unknown to us. Let's start working together to serve the common good.