RONCO in the News

A Mission to Remove Land Mines

D.C. Firm Is Sending Team to Afghanistan to Help Defuse Devices
By Amy Joyce
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 4, 2002; Page E05

A D.C.-based company is sending a contingent of staffers to Afghanistan today to defuse explosive mines and cluster bombs, part of a five-year State Department contract with the firm worth up to $250 million.

RONCO Consulting Corp. employees will spend six months working with Afghans to coordinate local efforts to remove mines. The 11-member team will meet with State Department officials in Jalalabad, who have a plan in place for the work, then move out to four other locations.

The privately held firm provides a range of mine services for the State Department, including training people in the countries affected, mine-awareness education, mine clearance and equipment for mine clearance. The company also provides agricultural development and international economic consulting assistance. It has 70 full-time and 20 part-time employees in the United States and about 300 contract workers in foreign countries.

	Stephen J. Edelmann, RONCO Consulting Corporation President and co-founder, left, with Bill Reid, a Program Manager who will head the company's mine-removal effort in Afghanistan. Reid is holding a Chinese fragmentation mine.

For the company's first eight to 10 years, 98 percent of its contracts were for the U.S. Agency for International Development. The company has also done work for the World Bank, the Slovenia International Trust Fund and the United Nations.

RONCO already has mine teams in Kosovo and Bosnia and has provided equipment for removing mines in about 20 countries, said Pat Patierno, director of the Office of Humanitarian Demining Programs with the State Department. "They've done exceptionally well," he said. "We've partnered with many . . . but RONCO is the most significant."

The new efforts are especially important, as Afghanistan is home not only to land mines but also to unexploded cluster bombs, which are "attractive to pick up because they look like toys," said Bill Reid, a RONCO program manager who spent 20 years in the U.S. Army in special forces and mechanized infantry. Reid will head up the company's effort in Afghanistan.

Older detectors that located metal mines are mostly ineffective in finding newer plastic ones, which are harder to detect, or unexploded devices such as the U.S. cluster bombs that dot the stark Afghan landscape. RONCO uses dogs, flails -- large wheeled or track vehicles that turn or beat the ground to dig up mines -- and people to find and disarm the explosives.

For about 10 years, Afghanistan had employed at least 4,000 people to remove mines and had used a number of dogs that were trained in a U.N. mine-clearance program. An estimated 10 million land mines were buried in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, said Mark Hiznay, senior researcher in the arms division of Human Rights Watch, a nongovernmental human rights organization. When the U.S. bombing began, the mine removers scattered.

Hiznay said some of the Afghan mine removers were run off by the Taliban, which "looted" offices stocked with radios, vehicles and protective gear.

RONCO, U.N. and State Department employees are now charged with finding, reorganizing and retraining the Afghan mine removers.

In 2000, eight of the largest humanitarian mine-defusing programs cleared a total of nearly 115,000 square miles of land, including in Afghanistan, Angola, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, Croatia, Kosovo, Laos and Mozambique, according to the Landmine Monitor.

RONCO gets its mine-detection dogs, usually German shepherds or Belgian Malinois, from a breeder in Holland. They are trained at the Global Training Academy in Somerset, Tex., just outside of San Antonio. The dogs are then shipped to Washington in sets of six to train with their handlers for several months.

The dogs work in one 30-by-30-foot square at a time, walking in a grid. When a dog smells explosives, it sits about three feet away, facing the scent. The handler then leads the dog through the walk again. If the dog reacts the same way a second time, the mine or cluster bomb is deactivated.

"Mine-detecting dogs certainly are very helpful. They are useful for establishing the perimeter of a mined area and finding explosives," said Mary Wareham, senior advocate at Human Rights Watch.

RONCO has not lost any dogs, although one was injured when it saw a stray dog and broke from its handler. John Wilkinson, RONCO vice president of operations, said three human casualties have been reported, one in 1998 and two in 2000, all in the Balkans, when three Bosnians, all RONCO contract employees, hit mine trip wires.

Clad in heavy gear, with face shields of plastic about an inch thick, workers prod the ground at an angle, so as not to trigger the top button on a mine. When they hit a piece of metal, it is dug up and safely detonated, a method commonly used by the military.

RONCO was founded in 1980 by Stephen J. Edelmann, 56, and his late partner, Ronald Boyd, because the two men "wanted to do something profitable and humanitarian," said Edelmann.

Edelmann earned an MBA at the University of Maryland and did international training and consultant work in private industry, where he met Boyd. Both took out second mortgages on their homes and worked out of a basement to launch their business, Edelmann said.

There are some jokes about the RONCO name -- which the firm shares with a company known for its late-night infomercials and the "Pocket Fisherman" -- but RONCO Consulting officials said government experts can tell the firms apart.

Their first contract sent experts and employees to Burundi and Jamaica to create agricultural programs and train local residents. "The idea is to find the experts and allow them to do their work," he said.