When I spoke with Guldin in December, after the first phase of the pilot was over, he sketched a rough vision that this work could look in a not -too -distant future. Robotic crawl equipped with cameras, strong lights, sonar and upgraded predatory systems can be used to download ammunition more efficiently than the cranes used on platforms, and they could act for an entire hour. With remote vehicles, landfills can also be resolved on several sides at once, which is impossible to do with a fixed platform on the surface. And the office experts – qualified workers in the absence – may be able to monitor most of the remote work from the Hamburg Office instead of spending their days at sea.
This reality may still be a little, but despite a few problems – like bad visibility underwater and sometimes inadequate illumination, which was difficult to remotely work through live pictures – most technology in the initial tests worked about how it was planned. “There is certainly room for improvement, but basically the concept acts, and the idea that you can recognize the underwater and store it immediately in the work of transport crates,” says Wolfgang Sichermann, a naval architect whose company, Seascape, has monitored the project on behalf of the German Ministry of Environment. The hope is that it will start designing and then in the coming months the construction of a floating disposal plant and start burning the first explosives sometime in 2026, Sichermann says.
Hands off?
When I visited the Sivera Bar last October, but a clear day, I spoke with a veteran ammunition expert Michael Scheffler, who had already spent a month on a platform in a nearby haffkur on the German coast, carefully pierced open heavy wooden wooden colors are the crates pushed into mud and mucus and full of 20 mm cannon of Nazi Germany. That morning, they already examined about 5.8 tons of 20 mm rounds, grabbed from mechanical predations and underwater robots, and then retreated to the platform.
Scheffler spent decades working as a munic removal expert, a job he started while serving in the German army. But he never fully understood the scope of the problem with the dismissed municipality – or had previously imagined that he was trying to directly solve the problem in a systematic way.
“I’ve been to work for 42 years and have never had the opportunity to work on such a project,” he told me. “What actually develops and explores here in a pilot project is worth her weight in gold for the future.”
Guldin, although similarly optimistic about the results of the pilot, warns that there are still limitations on how long it can be done at a distance with technology. Difficult, dangerous and sensitive work will sometimes require practical human expertise, at least in the foreseeable future. “There are limitations for a complete remote job on the seabed. Definitely, divers and Eod [explosive ordnance disposal] Specialists on the seafloor and experts on the spot will never leave, not at all. “
If the initial effort of cleansing proves to be successful, he hopes that technology may find ready customers somewhere else not just about the Baltic. Well in the 1970sThe soldiers around the world turned to the oceans as landfill for old ammunition.
However, since it cannot be made in burning old air bombs, any flourishing in disposing of underwater ammunition would depend on large investments in the remediation of the environment, which happen only rarely. “We could speed up the procedure and be definitely more effective,” Guldin says. “Only, if you bring more resources to the field, it also means that someone has to pay it. Do we have a government in the future that is ready to pay for it? Honestly, I doubt.”
“Two weeks ago I spoke with Ambassador Bahama,” Sichermann says. “He said,” You are more than welcome to come and clean everything that the British sank in the 70s, shortly before Bahamma became independent. “But they expect to bring money, not just technology. For this reason, you always have to see who is ready to finance it. “There is certainly no lack of rejected ammunition.”