Wartime bomb safely detonated in Bac Lieu

By Vietnam Plus   March 31, 2016 | 03:02 am PT
Wartime bomb safely detonated in Bac Lieu
People looking at houses destroyed by a wartime bomb blast in Hanoi, March 2016, Photo: Tomas Slavicek
Army engineers successfully carried out a controlled explosion on a 340 kilogram bomb on March 30 that had been discovered in An Phuc commune, Dong Hai district.

The bomb is bellieved to have been an MK117 model, an air-dropped general-purpose bomb used by the US military forces during the Vietnam War with an effective casualty radius of about one kilometer. 

Since the beginning of the year, five bombs have been unearthed and defused in the area. 

The US army used more than 15 million tons of bombs and mines during the war in Vietnam, four times the amount used in World War II. As a result, Vietnam has been listed among the countries most contaminated with unexploded ordnance (UXO). 

According to the State Steering Committee for the national action programme on settling post-war bomb and landmine impacts, about 800,000 tons of UXOs are still scattered across over 20 percent of Vietnam ’s land, mainly in the Central region. 
 

Preliminary statistics show that UXOs have claimed more than 42,000 lives and left about 62,000 injured, mostly rural people and children, in Vietnam over the last four decades.

 
 
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