Operation Department

Operation Department tasks:

1- Land Release

In Lebanon, a highly dense populated area, where contaminated land denies access to livelihoods, essential agriculture resources and housing, the vast majority of contaminated area is high and medium priority. Land release has focused primarily on clearing roads, the rehabilitation of infrastructures and houses, to allow for the prompt return of displaced population.

The operations department conducts all clearance and post-clearance operations including non-technical and technical surveys and is staffed with the following clearance assets:

• Manual teams: Battle Area Clearance (BAC) and Mine Clearance (MC) teams
• Mechanical teams
• Mine Detection Dogs (MDD)

Lebanon strongly insists on Gender Equality in mine action clearance allowing men and women to equally have access to mine action activities. Recently, women deminers are actively operating in Lebanon.

2- Rapid response

The Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) are responsible for rapid response 24 hours a day. All rapid responses are reacted on immediately to ensure the safety of the communities. However, at times mine action NGOs are also requested to assist LAF with requests in their geographical area of operations.

3- Training of Demining Teams

Each NGO or organization wishing to undertake demining activities in Lebanon must first complete a training program. All demining teams also undertake refresher training sessions at least twice a year. In addition, refresher training is required if a deminer has stopped work for a minimum two weeks and after sick leave. If an incident occurs, the entire team undergoes refreshed training if they receive several times unacceptable QA visits.

-  Controlling

Operation and QAQC officers conduct technical inspections on all demining tasks through weekly visits to the clearance sites to ensure that work is compliant with the clearance plan and according to the NMAS and to the standards operating procedures (SOP). Every year in January, re-accreditation of all organizations performing demining in Lebanon is undertaken. If compliant, the organization is granted a full operational accreditation for one year.

4- Capacity building and lessons learned

LMAC constantly strives to improve the planning and execution of the demining operations in Lebanon. Two aspects have currently been identified that could help performance, build national capacity and improve costs:

• All organizations working with LMAC, whether they are national or international, have provided their own individual training program for their staff based on the National Mine Action Standards (NMAS) and their SOPs.
• Under the LMAC guidance, there has been a drive to build national capacity NGOs within the international NGOs to reduce costs.