Making Ukraine Mine-Free Decades Ahead of Schedule: A Lesson from The Great Baltimore Fire

A rule of thumb for landmine clearance is that for every day a country is at war, it will take a month to clear that country of landmines. At this rate Ukraine might not be free of landmines until the 2060s. However, using an approach that has its roots in the Great Baltimore Fire almost 100 years ago, Ukraine may be mine-free decades ahead of schedule.

A Fresh Way of Looking at the Problem of Landmine Clearance

The roots of this approach involves the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904. Back then, more than 1,500 buildings in Baltimore burned to the ground. The firefighters who had come from as far away as Washington and New York stood by helplessly as they discovered that their fire-hose couplings didn’t fit the Baltimore hydrants.

Monika Blaumueller

The problem the firefighters were up against was that the United States had more than 600 sizes and variations in fire-hose couplings. In response to the Baltimore experience, NIST created a national standard for these couplings and today a fire company from one area in this country can help a fire company in any other. Today, NIST’s standards improve the effectiveness of thousands of functions from firefighting to cybersecurity. 

Monika Blaumueller, an innovation strategist who works with NIST, is taking a collaboration capability that was developed by NIST and applying it to landmine clearance. She’s working with experts in landmine clearance and unmanned aerial vehicles to make them more effective.

The landmine clearance experts found that 90 percent of their efforts are spent on searching for the landmines. I know about this firsthand because I spent a day watching a HALO Trust team outside of Kyiv going through an active minefield, swinging their metal detectors over every inch of ground to locate the mines. It’s painstaking work—with the ever-lurking possibility of being maimed or killed.

A Holistic Approach

Knowing that 90 percent of the efforts of landmine clearance come from trying to find them in the first place, tech companies and humanitarian organizations use video collected by drones.  After all, a drone traversing a field is orders of magnitude faster than swinging a metal detector over every inch of ground, and further, the risk to human lives is lower. 

Blaumueller learned that software can “see” and rapidly identify 60 different kinds of explosive devices from video as long as the explosives are on the ground surface. Depending on how drones are equipped, they can find signs of explosives below the surface.

They can do this in several ways. One way: chemicals from the explosives are toxic to plants. People looking at the footage can notice when plants are stressed by these toxins or when the temperature of a subsurface mine is different from the surrounding soil.

Small drones can fly 45-minute missions and require human operators nearby. Blaumueller is working with innovators whose unmanned equipment can operate continuously during daylight hours. During the Ukrainian summer, this could mean over 16 hours, while in winter, there could be only eight hours of light. These vehicles will cover more territory at lower costs and lower risk because they’re unmanned.  

These technologies in combination can be excellent at detecting mine. “Artificial intelligence is good at detecting patterns,” answers Blaumueller. “There are records of where armies have been, where war planes have flown overhead, or landmine injuries were reported.”

NIST’s coordination capability can send resources where they’ll be most effective. For example, are they needed in a particular farming area immediately because it’s almost time to plant this year’s corn crop? Or maybe flight schedules need to adjust to a new situation in real time, such as fog, high wind or a snowstorm in some areas, where the video will be too blurry to work, rescheduling for when it will.  

We can easily make all these calculations and more, with a speed and efficiency that humans can’t match. The hope is to identify hazards for under $20 per hectare. This is orders of magnitude faster and less expensive than doing the detection with individuals on the ground, swinging their metal detectors.

Much like the NIST efforts on fire hose connections, Blaumueller is working on creating an entire ecosystem of parts that work together for solving the most time-consuming aspects of mine clearance. She and her colleagues are reaching out to government, software development companies, equipment manufacturers, the armed forces, and NGOs such as HALO.

If all goes as planned, Ukraine can be mine-free decades ahead of schedule. Blaumueller hopes that additional people and organizations will join the effort to free Ukraine from landmines.