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Unexploded ordnance accidents claim 6 lives, injure 41 in Laos in 9 months

Xinhua, November 8, 2016 Adjust font size:

Six people have died while 41 others injured in unexploded ordnance (UXO) accidents so far in 2016, according to information released Tuesday in Lao capital Vientiane.

The number of UXO victims recorded so far this year is higher than last year as 47 victims and 24 accidents were reported in the first nine months of 2016. The majority of the victims were children, the UXO Sector Forum was told.

In the first nine months of 2016, a total of 3,225 hectares of land were cleared from UXO, including 2,214 hectares of agricultural land and over 1,000 hectares of land set for development, reported Lao News Agency on Tuesday.

More than 86,000 items of UXO, including over 70,000 bombies, were destroyed since the beginning of 2016. Non-technical surveys were completed in 735 villages this year, or 92 percent of the planned annual target within the Sector Five Year Plan of the National Regulatory Authority for the UXO/Mine Action Sector in Laos.

Meanwhile, technical surveys covered 12,993 hectares, establishing 8,138 hectares of Confirmed Hazardous Areas (CHA). So far, there are 29,103 hectares of CHA in Laos, said Vilavong Sysavath, Chief of the NRA program.

During the 1964-1973 war, about three million tons of explosive ordnance was dropped on Lao territory, including about 270 million sub-munitions from cluster bombs and about four million aircraft bombs. Tests in the United States have found that these types of cluster munitions can have a failure rate of up to 30 percent, said the report.

The Lao provinces with UXO contamination can be found constitute a total of 87,000 square kilometers of the Southeast Asian countrys land. The number of UXO survivors living in Laos remains at approximately 15,000. Endit