Using a Wind-Blown ‘Mine Kafon’ to Clear Landmines

See a slideshow of the Mine Kafon here.

Landmines kill and maim thousands of people every year, and getting rid of them isn’t easy.

It’s dangerous work, and it’s time-consuming.

But one man from Afghanistan has come up with a device that he thinks can help clear mines in a safer, easier way.

Massoud Hassani grew up in Kabul, near an area filled with unexploded mines. Later, when he’d emigrated to The Netherlands and became a design student, he came up with an idea to help clear such mines, and the ‘Mine Kafon’ was born.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: One of the lingering legacies of war is land mines. They kill and maim thousands of people each year, sometimes long after the conflict is over. Getting rid of them is time consuming, costly and deadly. But one many from Afghanistan thinks he’s come up with a way to clear mines in a cheaper, easier way. His device was inspired by a toy, and The World’s Clark Boyd writes about it in his latest column for the BBC Future website. Clark, first of all tell us more about this device. I understand it’s like a giant ball with bamboo legs?

Clark Boyd: Yeah, it’s a pretty amazing design, Marco. So you have to imagine an iron ball and then there are bamboo posts that radiate out from. Now, inside the bamboo ball is actually put a GPS device, and then at the end of the bamboo poles are little plastic feet. So the idea is that this device would be light enough to blow in the wind, but heavy enough to detonate the mines. And at the same time with the GPS you’d be able to track where it is going.

Werman: So tell us about the creator of this device and what was the toy that inspired him?

Boyd: So the name of the guy who invented it, his name is Massoud Hassani and until he was a teenager he lived in the northern part of Kabul in Afghanistan. And he lived right on the edge of an area of desert that was filled with land mines and all sorts of other ordinance that would go off. And he jokes and says you know, this was our playground, we used to play around this and we had a sense of how dangerous it was. But at the same time they were also playing with small wind-powered toys that they would build out of things they found on the ground. So when his family eventually left Afghanistan. They ended up in Holland. He ended up going to design school and when it came to do his last project for school, his teachers urged him to think back to his culture and come up with a design for something that he thought you know, could help out. And he immediately thought of these wind-powered toys and you know, could a larger scale version of this be used to clear a mine field.

Werman: Well it sounds ingenious, but does it work? Have they tested it?

Boyd: Well, they have tested it and he tested it in conjunction with the Dutch Ordinance Disposal Unit. And I talked to the guy who runs that and he was quite clear and quite frank that this device as it stands is not good for mine clearance. In other words, the idea originally was that it would be strong enough to withstand a number of explosions and could sort of detonate an entire mine field. Well, as it stands now the device kind of blows up and is unusable after it hits a couple of mines. Having said that, you know, it sounds like well, then it’s not gonna be very useful because for the United Nations standards you have to clear a mine field to 98% for it to be cleared, which is why the guy at the Dutch Ordinance Disposal Unit said look, this just isn’t gonna work the way it’s built right now; but he said, there’s no reason that maybe humanitarian organizations who are working in a dangerous area and are worried that there may be mines in the area, couldn’t deploy one or two of these at least to set the perimeters of where the mine field would be and then you know, the human teams could come in and do the actual de-mining.

Werman: But as you write, Clark, in your Future column, the inventor Hassani is excited about the prospect of tweaking this device and making it work.

Boyd: Oh, absolutely, he’s completely committed to it. He wants to try and find ways to make the bamboo stronger so that it will withstand more explosions. He wants to find ways to better integrate the GPS and use the GPS unction of it, and he’s even working on another kind of device that would be more of a kind of a roller device that would potentially disable more mines at a time.

Werman: Well, we’ll see how this little idea evolves. The World’s Clark Boyd who writes about Massoud Hassani’s Mine Kafon in his latest column for the BBC Future website. You can read more about it and see a slideshow at our website, theworld.org. Clark, thank you.

Boyd: You’re welcome, Marco.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

The World’s Clark Boyd writes about the device in his latest column for the BBC Future website – here’s an excerpt:

A simple device that is designed to clear some of the millions of landmines scattered around the world offers a lesson in thoughtful design and adaptation.

The global statistics on land mines and their effects make sobering reading. According to the United Nations, up to 110 million mines have been laid across more than 70 countries since the 1960s and that between 15,000 and 20,000 people die each year because of them.

Many of the victims are civilians – children, women and the elderly – not soldiers. Thousands more are maimed. Moreover, mines are cheap. The UN estimates that some cost as little as $3 to make and lay in the ground. Yet, removing them can cost more than 50 times that amount. And the removal is not without human cost either. The UN says that one mine clearance specialist is killed, and two injured, for every 5,000 mines cleared.

One of the worst affected countries is Afghanistan, with an estimated 10 million land mines contaminating more than 200 square miles of land. It is something that Massoud Hassani, who grew up in the northern part of Kabul, knows that all too well. “We lived out by the airport, and there’s a big desert out there where all different militaries trained,” Hassani tells me. “It was a real war zone. They left a lot of explosives, including land mines.”

“But, it was our playground,” Hassani continues. “When we were kids, we used to make these wind-powered toys, and play with them on this desert full of explosives, and they’d get stuck out there.” Read More>>

Follow @clark_boyd