Help needed to clear bombed road route HANOI - The building of a second north-south highway may require significant international assistance to help clear thousands of unexploded bombs and artillery shells left over from the war. The extent of the danger facing road crews was illustrated this week when authorities revealed army engineers had uncovered 601 unexploded bombs and thousands of other pieces of unexploded ordnance at a single bridge construction site in central Quang Binh province. Chuck Searcy, co-ordinator of the Landmines Campaign Group in Vietnam, said workers were often killed disturbing unexploded ammunition. "Many workers were killed last year during construction of the road from Dong Ha to the border with Laos and it was reported that 300 pieces of ordnance were discovered in one particular section just 1km long," he said. "It really goes to show how difficult development work can be, particularly in central Vietnam." According to some estimates American forces saturated Vietnam with three times the entire tonnage of bombs used during World War II and the US military concedes that as many as one in 10 bombs failed to detonate. The most heavily bombed areas were those around the so-called demilitarised zone, in central Vietnam, and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which snaked its way along the Vietnamese border and often penetrated deep into Laos and Cambodia. Large sections of the trail, which was a network of roads and tracks to supply communist troops fighting in the south, will form the route of a new highway linking Ho Chi Minh City with Hanoi. The decision to build the highway was fast-tracked after last year's devastating floods in central Vietnam, which severely disrupted the flow of traffic along the existing north-south road. Vietnam has been reluctant to allow foreign organisations to help with its landmine and unexploded ordnance problem, assigning the job to its own military engineers. But Mr Searcy said the scale of the new project and Vietnam's limited resources meant it was unlikely the project could be completed as planned in 2003. "There was heavy bombing all along the trail and in many places there were huge concentrated attacks, so dealing with this problem will be one of the biggest components of the whole project," he said. By Huw Watkin - South China Morning Post - March 24, 2000.