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Welcome back.
A country that's seen two wars on their soil is cleaning out some fragments of the past.
US Army explosive ordnance and disposal soldiers
head up a team of experts in Estonia
as part of the Weapons Removal and Abatement program.
Jerry Bryza shows us their mission.
[Bryza] Estonia is a country rich with history and heritage.
But part of this history and its location in northeast Europe
has left another kind of legacy--unexploded ordnance, or UXOs,
from two world wars and a Soviet occupation.
The Estonian Rescue Board is the main explosive ordnance disposal,
or EOD, responder when these dangerous items are found.
US soldiers from the 702nd EOD Company
are training their civilian counterparts on UXO detection equipment.
New software will help the Estonians make a virtual map
of an old battlefield and locate numerous UXOs at one time.
They have a lot of buried UXO,
and this will help them find everything and essentially render their country safer.
[Bryza] During the class, an emergency call comes in.
A janitor finds a UXO near a Tallinn hospital complex.
The Russian artillery round from World War II
had been pushed to the surface by frost upheaval.
The Estonian team, with a US soldier to observe,
moves the ordnance to an area where they use plastic explosives
to destroy the round. [explosion]
The state of the round is typical of ordnance often found here--
rusted and in bad shape
but, fortunately, is not unstable.
If it had been, US donated robots could have been used
to keep EOD technicians safe.
That is one reason why the equipment is handed over ceremoniously
by the US Ambassador to Estonia, Michael C. Polt.
We are donating today another tranche
of combined State Department and EUCOM
US military supplied equipment to our Estonian partners here
both in terms of detection equipment,
in anti-explosive devices robots, and training materials.
[Bryza] Ambassador Polt says this and their commitment to the mission
will allow Estonia to go from being a consumer of EOD technology and knowledge
to a provider to our allies and missions around the world.
Reporting from Tallinn, Estonia, I'm Jerry Bryza, 21st Theater Sustainment Command.