Basic Deminers' Course
Story by Mikael Bold, Technical Field Manager
Mikael Bold and interpreter Nabil Mattar explaining the basic function of a landmine
The Basic Deminers Training Course was conducted by Technical Field Manager Mikael Bold as Chief Training Officer and Technical Field Manager Magnus Rundström as Assessment Officer, during June 2004.
15 trainees were selected from the 25 applicants interviewed. For this training course we had 150 interested applicants. From the 15 selected only 13 trainees finished the course. Out of these trainees 5 have now been offered employment as deminers.
The course was divided in to five parts:
- Basic training in order to learn drills stated in our Standard Operating Procedures
- Training operations were all the drills are used as similar to live operations as possible
- Assessment of the drills by the Assessment Officer during training operations
- First Aid
- Theoretical exams
The training area was located at Joun Power Station an area previously cleared from mines by a MAG team. The area is perfect due to the vast variation of different terrain types and low contamination of metal scrap in the ground. Here we found steep slopes, hard ground, soft ground and thick vegetation to practice all the drills and at the same time the trainees will be placed in an environment similar to our live operation areas. The training area was prepared as a normal minefield with fence, marked access routes and site layout according to our Standard Operating Procedures.
All training started at 08.00 hours in the training area and finished at 14.30 hours in the training area. Loading, unloading of equipment and transportation to and from training area were not included within these hours.
In order to simulate mines we used mousetraps of different sizes. The mousetraps were perfect in order to get the deminers to conduct the drill correctly.
