A 750-pound U.S. M117 bomb was safely detonated in Vietnam on Thursday in Quang Tri province, the most heavily bombed province during the war.
The non-governmental organization Project RENEW and their partner Norwegian People’s Aid cleared the area and prepared the blast site in order to safely dispose of the air-dropped bomb. Project RENEW released this footage of the blast, capturing the detonation from multiple angles:
Experts from the RENEW and NPA teams identified the bomb as a M177 series, a free-fall, unguided general purpose bomb dropped by U.S. forces on Quang Tri province. The bomb was discovered by police in Quang Tri’s Vinh Linh District after they stopped a motorist who was traveling with a large metal cylinder under a sheet of cloth on his motorcycle, according to Tuoi Tre newspaper. The man said he unearthed the bomb from a local rubber plantation and was transporting it to sell for scrap metal and gunpowder, a dangerous practice that many in Vietnam continue to do with unexploded ordnance from the Vietnam war.
“It could have resulted in immense destruction, including deaths and injuries to many people and the scrap collectors themselves,” Hien Ngo, communications and development manager for Project RENEW told Military Times. “Fortunately for them the police intervened.”
The teams worked in 100-degree heat to fill and place 1,000 sandbags around a pit the bomb was placed in to limit the blast radius.
This is the first M117 that RENEW-NPA teams have detonated, according to Ngo. The majority of large aerial bombs destroyed by the teams has been the 500-pound MK82 bomb.
“The explosion was truly terrifying, making people aware of the extent of devastation such a bomb could cause,” Ngo said.
Project RENEW and NPA receive funding from the U.S. State Department’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement.
In Quang Tri province alone, 8,500 casualties from accidents involving unexploded ordnance have occurred since the war ended in 1975,
according to Project RENEW. Thirty one percent of the victims have been children. Since 2007, Project RENEW and NPA have removed and destroyed more than 52,000 pieces of unexploded ordnance.
