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History

Walter Krohn initially was trained as aircraft manufacturer, but then for family reasons moved in the sector of soil processing, reclamation and forest tree breeding. Beeing 19 years old he reported for the first time an innovation for patent (DE000000889847B), which was to establish the 40-year success of its medium-sized company with millions of transactions. (Details in http://www.waldbau.de)

As a result, more new developments were created and patented, most recently a machine for forest land reclamation DE000004441075C1 , WO001998001718A1 and others, the so-called "Krohn´s Forest Tiller". This device is suitable to restore fast and cost-efficient even strong overgrown forest areas, forest fire areas or storm damaged areas completelly for afforestation or agricultural use. An environmental study evaluates the machine to be particularly recommended for forest and plantation renewal.

A movie about the cumbersome and dangerous minesweeping by a BMVg (Ministry of Defence)-owned company with former NVA soldiers from the East German border caught Krohn's attention. It turned out despite all the automation and mechanization of life in the 20th Century, the land mine clearance is still done by hand, at best, supported by vehicles, where the deminers are almost unprotected poking with poles in the ground. Krohn recognized immediatelly: His machine, which had been proven under extreme conditions in the forest on thousands of Hectares by shredder all the broken trees and tree stumps into wooden chips in seconds, and does not stop from stones, should also apply to the evacuation of landmines are set a new standard of safety, cost and speed.

Extensive tests confirmed the full suitability and research confirmed that worldwide there was no similar compatible device. In addition, it turned out that the current world experts in their standards kept firm in their established manual demining as the only way and propagate it despite alarming accident statistics: In 1000 defused mines at least one serious accident happenes, i.e. about 100 per year, where accident figures sometimes subject to military secrecy and probably many are unreported.

The deminers work with toy shovel, pruning shears and a kind of knitting needle and the only test instrument is the metal detector. This alarms at every nail, but can not locate plastic mines, which account for the wider majority. So it happened in 1999 at the European Conference on Mine at EU-Defense Research Center JRC in Ispra, Italy the grotesque situation that  for promotional purposes, a field test was presented with metal detectors in the sandbox were 100% were false alarms, but instead 30% of the mines, -because build of plastic- were not located. For this purpose the metal detectors, the title of "safe ".

Krohn had offered to the MoD in 1993 for mine clearance at the German-German border to 90 km length: Offer Price 16.1 million DM. MoD refused this offer and instead paid to his own company for 180 km mined border strip over 500 million DM. Two reports of the Federal Budget Committee accused this abuse. Krohn would do the same job for 6.4% of the federal government spent taxpayers' money and he offered this with guaranteed quality and at a fraction of the time.

Later it turned out, that on the whole area only 5 functioning mines were found and the rest were duds. Thus, the disposal of each operational mine cost the taxpayer 100 million DM!

Krohn was commissioned by the Federal Foreign Office in 1995 to prove the reliability of its machines on difficult minefields in Mozambique. Chronology Mozambique, Test clearance in Mozambique.

This area correlated to the world output of all mine action together as of the year. Krohn's success was so spectacular that Foreign Minister Kinkel had arrived in July 1996 with a business delegation of 100 heads of german (defense) businessmen to demonstrate the market potential of such technology on site. Thereby he called on the defense industry to recreate these machines. Since then, on a regular basis "conference " on mechanical demining of defense industry and the military happen.

It was conceded by military experts from around the world, including from the Bundeswehr, that the KMMCS would be the best system in the world. Also the Federal Foreign Office also shared this assessment. Despite of severe handicaps, caused by Federal Foreign Office, Krohn has cleared in Mozambique at 100 working days, 150 acres 100% mine-free, a feat that no one has ever provided the world.

KMMCS is still the world's only device calibrated to detect total mine clearance, see test in Mozambique in May 1996. The test shows that all 264 mines were destroyed. It was left no life mine.

Worldwide first time a testlane was created to carried out a test in which the basis for calculating "number of mines laid = 100%" was known. Thus it was now possible to express clearance rate in percent. It was the world's first test to determine the clearance quality for a method or technique.

The manual demining has never done such a test.our philosophy

KMMCS exceeds standard for mechanical mine clearance by the UN sub-organization UNMAS on 12. October 2006 issued as IMAS 9.50, by the fact that the demand in Section 4.4, that requires manually operating demining or mine detection dogs can be omitted. To establish an internal quality control also at mechanical base was already a decade before the release of the IMAS 9.50 our standard.

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KMMCS - Maschinelle Minenräumung und Bodensanierung
(KMMCS - Mechanical Mine Clearance and Soil Rehabilitation)
Tobias Steidle
Am Ehrenhain 2
D-38678 Clausthal
Germany
Tel.: +49 (0) 5323 92 21 55
Fax: +49 (0) 5323 92 21 56
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