Clearing the Way: Military EOD Techniques Helping to Bring Us Renewable Energy.

Marshal’s Andy Thompson enters the highly specialized world of Marine Explosive Ordnance Disposal, and speaks with Andy Ward, Director of Strategy and Global Operations at EODEX Ltd, about the levels of training required at both the operator and the client level, as the energy industry proliferates offshore.   

Tell us about EODEX Ltd?

It’s a new company that was established in late 2017, so we’re pretty new to the UXO and Risk Mitigation marketplace. We have small team at the moment, three or four of us on a full-time basis but, as with most UXO companies, the workforce is predominantly subcontracted day rate work. We just won our first big contract, on the south coast of England and it’s probably a three to four-month marine UXO contract clearing the seabed or potentially 20 to 30 confirmed UXO targets. We’re still doing the investigation phase at the moment. So, things are looking good. We’ve done some good work, with more in the pipeline, and we have a global outlook, and we’re looking at the markets on the east coast of the United States and Far East.

Our key clients are energy developers, operators – people like Scottish Power, Ørsted A/S, a renewables operator – building wind farms or putting in place cables or connectors on the seabed. They want to make sure that the legacy of historic UXO has been dealt with properly.

Explain a bit more about the nature of the UXO – presumably remnants of WW2?

Mainly. I’m relatively new into EODEX, but I was running another company, for the last four years, doing pretty much the same thing. We had a project up in the northern North Sea off Aberdeen – a wind farm location. We found fifty-six confirmed targets up there. Probably about half of those were very large World War One or World War Two projectiles – 15 inch projectiles – with a smattering other things: air-dropped bombs, smaller projectiles, depth charges, torpedoes, that sort of stuff. So most of it is World War Two – and sometimes it’s hard to tell!

 The outlook for EOD-trained personnel appears to be promising?

 Well, the industry is not going away as we are developing more and more renewable energy areas, and most of it based offshore. And, of course, there is some stuff onshore as well. The training need is really for awareness and risk assessment – making sure the developers and the people who are going to be involved with the work itself, in terms of putting the wind farms in place, understand there is a risk – and most of them do. Most of them get that, of course, but it’s how they can best deal with it that is important.

So we try to put across the sensible and timely, and most cost effective option for them to get rid of the problem, and it may well be, actually, if we get in there early enough, we can advise them that if they can avoid it in the first place by doing the survey and finding some clear areas, then go and do that because you don’t need to do anything about it at all. As much as we will happily go and clear the seabed for them, I think if we can give them an honest answer and say, look, if you can avoid the UXO by such and such a distance, and recommend that’s safe, then that’s you good to go.

 So, a lot of the training requirement is familiarization and awareness at different levels. Senior management need that higher, perhaps more strategic outlook, and they want to understand what the risks are, and they like to have a little bit more quantified risk so they can make informed decisions.

The guys at the coalface, when it gets around to putting the stuff in place, they want to know that that risk has gone away – but it’s still about familiarization to them in terms of what do they do if they find something. We can never guarantee that we have cleared everything to a hundred percent. Ever. We’ll never be able to do that unless we can drain the oceans and have a look. So, there is still the small risk that they could come across something. So, familiarization training for clients is pretty important.

 Then, of course, it’s our own internal training, and making sure the people that we use are current, that they’re competent and that they’re able to do what we want them to do. And that’s really important as well, because we can get all the ex-Navy divers in the world and send them out there to go and do the job, but who knows how current or competent they are? Just because they spent 15 years in the Royal Navy doing this, it doesn’t mean that they’re completely current to go out and do it in the commercial world – it’s a very different kettle of fish.

How do you approach the skills “currency” issue?

What we’ll normally do is two, maybe three times a year, depending what the uptake needs to be, we’ll carry our accreditation training for our own operators. We’ll have half a dozen or so that we know we’re going to be using for the next project or two. We’ll take them down to Alford’s training establishment in Somerset. It’s dry training – it’s in a quarry area they’ve got down there, which is has an explosive training license.

We can put them through that – we can run through all the weapons, and we can use the EOD tools and we can practice loading them properly. We can actually arm them safely and then use them in a safe environment and then show people the results of what we’re trying to achieve, which is really good. You can’t beat that, because it’s really, really difficult to do it at sea against a seabed target, because of the expense of having to do that with a vessel and a remotely operated vehicle and everything else is huge. So, we’ve got to do what we can and achieve a really good level of training as best we can, whilst operating within sensible budgetary constraints.

A primary aim is to train the operators. But we also invite other people down and say, look, this is what we’re doing. This is what we’re using. These are the tools we’re using to achieve the aim, and this is how it works. So, it’s an ongoing push for familiarization and awareness, really.

It’s a very niche sector indeed. What sets you apart?

I’ve been doing commercial UXO for over eight years, since I left the Royal Navy, and for all of that time, and pretty much all the time that companies have been carrying out this sort of work, the answer to seabed UXO, once you’ve found and you know where it is, is to detonate it. By achieving a high order detonation, you know that that bomb, that projectile, that torpedo, whatever it might be, is detonated and gone away. But, of course, that has a big impact on the environment – to the seabed, but primarily to the flora and fauna, the local sea life, and not just the fish, but sea mammals, particularly seals, dolphins, porpoises, of which there are many in the waters around the UK. 

So we’re trying to deal with the UXO items, but without detonating them. We use military EOD techniques to a more refined level and we’ll try to carry out low order techniques to make sure we can deal with an item to make it safe, break it open, and burn the explosive fill which reduces the impact to the seabed, and to marine life in general. That’s our USP. That’s what we’re trying to push. We’re trying to push “low order deflagration”, to use the proper term, which involves burning out the fill rather than detonating it.

We’ve got a little bit of momentum behind this – the actress Joanna Lumley has taken this on as one of her campaigns. She’s very keen to see renewable energy succeed, and when she got wind of the fact that there is a more gentle and perhaps greener method of bomb disposal, she was really keen to see what she could do. So she jumped in. She’s on our side.

We’re hoping that over the next year or two that there’ll be a step change in the in the energy industry and they’ll understand that actually there is a better way of dealing with UXO rather than just detonating it in situ.

Who oversees training and delivery standards in this sector? 

The only real professional training for this at the moment is provided by the military – and not just the British military, the Royal Navy, but, other NATO navies, and other allied national military forces are trained pretty well. We will only really use ex Royal Navy operators that have achieved “Advanced Status”. We know who those people are. It’s a small world and we know where they are and what they can do. So that’s fine. But there is no real civilian accreditation or qualification for these people.

At the moment, we at EODEX, together with some colleagues at other companies and some other involved organisations such as the HSE, The MCA and IMCA, are looking at trying to formalise those requirements into an ISO, that will then formalise who can and can’t undertake offshore bomb disposal, because at the moment actually anybody can go and carry out offshore bomb disposal. There are no rules and regulations – for marine EOD, we are one of the least regulated environments in the in the world, here in the U.K. So, not just from a safety point of view but, commercially, anybody can come in and operate in these waters and, if they win the contract, they can go and do it and they can use whoever they like to do it. There is no real direction from the HSE; there’s nothing from the Maritime or Coastguard Agency. So we’re trying to formalize ourselves – we want to police our own industry and make sure we are using the right people to make sure that all our competitor companies are using the right people as well, because not all of them, perhaps, might be as keen on that as we are!

We do come across companies who will use lesser qualified people who might not necessarily check the validity of their CVs, for instance. It’s really important to use the right people, to make sure they’re competent and current, and then hopefully the ISO that we’re producing will be able to be used by a client to check that the contractor they take on to do their offshore bomb disposal work is competent, current, and the people are sufficiently trained.

Why do you think that situation exists?

I think the relationship of renewable energy has really given birth to the offshore EOD and UXO industry over the last, I would say, 15 years, maybe a little bit more – when the first wind farms were being put in place in the U.K. because the U.K. (and couple of other northern European countries ) does still lead the world in renewable energy, wind farm development.

When the developers first started putting these things in place they had a few close calls with items of UXO being found. When the wind farm turbines themselves are put in place, they’re impacting upon the seabed. And then there’s all sorts of scope for the cables to be dug into the seabed in between the turbines and, of course, to bring the electricity ashore. There were a few close calls. Nobody was ever injured, fortunately, and I don’t think anything was damaged, but it was pretty close. So that raised awareness, and, in turn, somebody said, okay, we better do something about it. So, a couple of companies, individuals really, in existence at the time, privately put their hand up and said, “yes, we can do that for you. We can make that problem go away”. And that’s where it grew from. So, in those early days, commercial operators did the right thing, and now we’re trying to reduce the risk to those operators. And it’s all about reducing the risk down to ALARP – as low as low as reasonably practicable. As mentioned before: we can’t reduce the risk to zero, but we can get it down to ALARP and that’s our aim.

Has the training and delivery undergone any kind of innovation or evolution over the years, as technology has improved?

I’d like to think that EODEX are leading the way here. We’re using some military technology and we’ve partnered with a company that makes that – Alford Technologies in Somerset. We’re working with them to make sure we can import that military standard equipment and use it in the commercial environment.

So, whilst the technology isn’t innovative, I think that being able to use in a commercial environment is. And we are allowed to do that. There are no security ramifications to it. It is all perfectly usable, and that’s why we’re able to achieve the low order deflagration rather than just detonating things. And that’s really what we’re after. Nobody’s really tried to do that. The answer, up until now, has been detonate it or lift and move it and take it away and put it somewhere else. But then you’ve still got to detonate it anyway. So, we’re trying to be a little bit innovative in using military technology and we’re trying to be a bit innovative in our practices.

How long do you anticipate this UXO actually having risk associated with it – how many years does it take for it to degrade?

There are different schools of thought. Some people will say that if you leave it long enough, it will degrade so much that it will self-detonate. I don’t really buy into that. I think it’s pretty unlikely. I think most of this stuff, you’ve got to be pretty careful with it. But by the very nature of the fact that it’s already been fired out of a gun, dropped from plane, pushed out of a torpedo tube, whatever it might be, and then impact with the seabed – it’s clearly been bumped around. So it’s reasonably robust. If it didn’t go bang when it was supposed to, that carries with it a reasonable bit of risk mitigation already. So, I think the stuff could be there for years to come. We find a lot of stuff from World War 1 or before, certainly in the land environment there’s a lot of stuff that is lying around that still does pose a risk.

I don’t think it’s going to go away. I don’t think we’re ever going to get to the position where we can say, “OK, that’s it. There’s no UXO threat from anything to anyone”. I can’t see that ever happening, really. And as we continue to use this stuff and we’re clearing up, for instance, MOD remote areas and MOD ranges, and that’s reasonably recent weapons and ammunition that we’re clearing, so I think we’ll be around for a while.

What needs to change in this sector do you think, with regard to training?

Again, it is awareness. I think its awareness of what we can do and how we can do it. We’re pushing the low order procedures. We’ve got a really good technical partnership with Alford, so we know we can do it. We know how it can be done. And we were raring to go to go and do it. But there is a lot of resistance because there are a lot of people out there who don’t quite understand it and they don’t quite see the technical solution and will always say, you’ve got to be prepared for things to detonate anyway, which is true to an extent – but, if we’re really careful and we understand what we’re doing and we understand the technical specifications of our equipment, we’ve got a really high likelihood of making it safe using the low order technique rather than detonating.

So that’s annoying, really, because there’s a lot of resistance to it within our own industry, because there’s a lack of understanding. So we’re trying to rectify that. We’re trying to invite people to understand our procedures. We invite them to our training days at the and we’ll do what we can to try to raise awareness, because it’s I think probably ethically the right thing to do as well. Obviously commercially, we’ve got to be reasonably careful because we still have to remain competitive. So it’s a fine line between the two of those.

It would seem that what constitutes “success” is fairly self evident when you are talking about the difference between detonation or non-detonation. How else can you define success?

I think actually it’s quite interesting seeing the level of knowledge – or the lack of knowledge – in the Energy industry of quite how many pieces of ordnance there are lying around the seabed. When we first have initial contact with some clients, unless they’ve been in this in a different area or different company, it’s quite astounding – they just don’t realise how many pieces of ordnance are going to be in their potential windfarm area, and what we might need to do about that. They may think it is one or two, but actually working on the rue of percentages, there is probably going to be 50 to 60 pieces of ordnance in your windfarm. The one I mentioned before where we cleared 56, we estimated to the client they’ll be 50 or 60 items in your windfarm area – there were 56! So that was quite a good bit of number crunching!

So, that’s interesting for organizations that aren’t used to dealing with UXO or EOD – and also, of course, the risk and the threat that these things do represent. You look at some of the riskier items, for instance – World War 2 German sea mines, parachute mines – these things have got 900 kilos of explosive. They are designed to sink large vessels. If one of those detonates in close proximity to a vessel that’s putting in place pylons for a wind farm, there’s not going to be much left. So, that’s a really interesting part and is actually quite satisfying: being put across to a client that this is the risk, and it is a real risk, and this is what could happen. Then they tend to sit up and take it seriously.   

I’m sure failures in training could have very significant consequences. Have you experienced any?

I’m pleased to say not in any of the areas. or any of the companies I’ve worked for either as a contractor or as a member of staff. But I have seen other companies providing people to a vessel that are blatantly underqualified to do what they should be doing. And because there’s no legislation or regulation that says they can or can’t do that, and there’s nothing to stop them, it’s obvious these people aren’t qualified. They’re probably not competent, certainly may not be current.

So, it could well be that you’re putting someone in the marine environment who has not operated in the marine environment before – they’re perfectly competent to do this sort of stuff on land, but they may not have been on the vessel, but because they were in the right place at the right time, they’ve managed to land that contract, that piece of work, and off they go. And that is a real risk because it’s a very different environment, doing it on the seabed and the risks involved.

Diversity is a key driver for many organizations today. Do you see many females that have come through military training and into the commercial environment?

There have been the first few female Clearance Divers that have gone through the Royal Navy over the last five or six years. In fact, earlier than that, and I think there have been a couple of officers and two or three ratings have gone through quite successfully, but we haven’t seen any of them come through into the commercial environment on the marine side yet.

We have employed one female former RN clearance diver. She was very good. She knew what she was doing and that went down well on the site because she was professional and she understood what she was doing. Some people just don’t quite understand what they’re supposed to be doing in a commercial environment. And it’s very difficult, unless you’re there with them all the time. So she was very good. But she’s the only one I know of so far. She’s still on the circuit. I think she’s still working. She’s working as a diver as well. The aim for most the Navy guys is to get into the offshore work because it pays better. And that’s what they know, so that’s why they want to get back to. So, I’m sure that will grow as ladies join the service and when they’re coming out the service, we’ll see more and more of it.

What should potential clients for your services look for when trying to find a provider… And what should they avoid?

I think honesty is always really, really important, so try to look at companies with a project history and what have they actually done. And that, for instance, being blatantly honest is tricky when you’re in a new company and you don’t necessarily have project history…. I’ve got history. I’ve been doing this for 8 years and my counterparts in the company, who have been doing it in various other organizations – we’ve got nearly 100 years of military and commercial experience between us but we know how we can put that across to a client. But a client may not necessarily look at us as a company and say, well, hang on, you haven’t got a minimum two years’ experience yet, so that can be tricky.

Talking to a client about what to avoid is horses for courses, really. If you get into a Marine project, look at a company that specializes in the marine environment. So there are companies out there that will cover both land and marine UXO work, and that’s fine – one the companies I worked for before did that as well – but I think, again, just to make sure they’ve got the right pedigree for both sides, because not everybody will have.

So, talking to people, talking to other people in the industry – for most of these big projects, the client will first and foremost bring in a consultant to start with and right at the very beginning of the pre survey side of things, and that consultant will generally have a pretty good finger on who to use as a contractor for investigation and disposal. So, it’s great to know the industry as well.

As people transition out of the Navy, what should they be doing to stay current in terms of their skills and drills?

The nice thing is it’s a small world. So we pretty much know each other. Most of the guys leaving are pretty senior. They were probably in the Navy for 15 years, 20 years plus. So generally know each other and word gets around really quickly. There’s not that many companies like us that specialise in the marine environment and that’s why these Navy guys will generally gravitate towards us. A lot of these people are generally based around Portsmouth due to the location of the naval base and HQ of the Fleet Diving Squadron.

They know who we are, and as they’re about to leave, they start putting the feelers out, the old boys network kicks in and they know who to talk to because their chums have already left and are successful or not. But we do still engage with and still have pretty good, close links with the Royal Navy, with the guys that are still serving. So, I think that’s really important as well. I don’t think, we could be seen as any sort of recruitment service, but we certainly know when the guys are leaving. We’re always really happy to talk to them and try and help them out a bit, and say, look, we’ve been in your shoes. We know what it’s like to come out of the Service after a long time. And if you want to come into this industry, here’s a few pointers for you.

Do you impart knowledge back to the Navy – is that relationship in place, so that you can keep each other up to speed on latest TTPs?

We still know the guys in the Fleet Diving Squadron reasonably well. We don’t necessarily communicate daily but having the ability to pick up the phone and have a chat is really useful So, I think, as a company, that helps us out as well. But of course, with the military, they may not always be as advanced in some areas as the commercial world can be, because we’re looking at doing things in a very different way for very different reasons. The military have a really long, hard procurement process, and sometimes other equipment and technologies can be in use much, much more rapidly in the commercial environment. So we may have the steal on some of that, and it may well be, actually, that we can use the equipment in a different way.

At the end of the day, the basics of putting an explosive charge on the seabed or dealing with a piece of UXO, are pretty simple, really. And the guys have been doing it for a long, long time. It’s just a case of how we’re going to do it because we’re doing it in the cold, hard commercial world as opposed to in that warfighting environment.

What has surprised you in this environment?

I think the Joanna Lumley thing is quite interesting. There’s a lot of social media discussion about Joanna Lumley, but I have been really impressed with just how quickly she’s taken on board the technical aspects of marine EOD and understands and is then able to push that back out in only the way that she can. And it’s absolutely fantastic. She was on Radio four on the Today programme with a three or four minute piece talking about it, and she was absolutely all over it, despite getting some pretty hard questioning. I was very impressed, she’d clearly done her research. She was really good. So, yeah, thanks, Joanna!

What training services provider have you been impressed by?

Alford Technologies are a UK company based down in Trowbridge, Somerset. They were set up by Professor Sydney Alford quite some time ago – 25 years at least. He’s one of the foremost brains in explosive technology and things like counter IED and EOD work. They really are very good, and they got some excellent people in there. They’ve got the real grey matter and they produce some amazing equipment. And the training they deliver is well is very good. They still deliver training to serving military units, commercial organizations and overseas militaries, all sorts of people. They just do it in a really good way, just thorough. It’s professional. I think sometimes that first impression of what you’re going to deliver to somebody, whether it’s training or operations or whatever it might be, is really important. I think Alfords have got that – they got some really good people in there. So, the joint venture partnership that EODEX have with them is great to have in place. That was a really clever piece of work to put that in place, because Alford have been used by lots of militaries around the world, but they’ve never really had commercial use of their EOD products on a large scale.

Their equipment was used by the Polish Navy about three weeks ago to render safe a WW2 12000 lb ‘Tallboy’ bomb in a Polish canal. The Polish Navy did that really, really well with Alford advice, Alford technology, and carried it out fantastically. So, really good liaison from it – a commercial provider to a current military unit, the Polish Navy. Just really impressive. Really, really, good. So, I’m pleased we’re in a Joint Venture with them and nobody else!

Sadly, Andy passed away in 2022 after losing a short battle with cancer. May he rest in peace. 

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