Clearing port for humanitarian relief is painstaking process

UMM QASR, IRAQ-Marine Corps Capt. Mike Butler did not even stop to watch the ship pull into port.

For nearly a week, Butler, operations officer for Naval Special Clearance Team One, has worked around the clock overseeing efforts to clear this port, where Iraqis receive more than two-thirds of their food. But as a hulking British cargo ship carrying humanitarian supplies became the first allied ship to pull into a berth late last week, Butler stayed inside a sparse warehouse, poring over the latest sonar imagery of the port's riverbed, coordinating the schedules of U.S., British and Australian dive teams, and hoping that dolphins specially trained to ferret out mines buried in muddy sea bottoms would be in the mood to work.

"There's more a lot work to be done to get the whole port open," Butler says. Managing mines means never celebrating your work, lest you be caught off guard.

In this ancient port, gigantic cargo cranes loom several stories high. Long, flat warehouses filled with buoy markers and harbor lights stretch more than a football field in length and the superstructure of a conveyor belt snakes between blue, orange and brown shipping containers toward berths along the Kahwr Abd Allah River. But no commercial cargo ships are moored here. The last supertanker carrying oil left more than a week ago. Until the arrival of the humanitarian ship, Iraq's only deepwater port connecting the country to the Persian Gulf was a ghost town.

About a week ago, the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit and British forces roared through and seized control of the port, shooting Iraqis off the tops of the cranes in fierce firefights. Most of those forces have since moved north, but about 100 Navy and allied troops have moved in for a job equally as daunting. They have to ensure the dirty, swift-running waters of the port are cleared of sea mines so that humanitarian supplies-and, eventually, commercial cargo-can be brought in. So far, only a handful of mines on abandoned barges have been discovered in the port.

Navy Capt. Michael O'Moore, commander of Mine Countermeasures Squadron 3, which oversees countermine forces in the region, says the effort to clear the waterways in and round Umm Qasr is the largest countermine effort the United States has engaged in since the 1991 Persian Gulf War. O'Moore is pleased with pace of operations, saying countermining is a "very deliberate methodical process" that can take weeks. Planning for the operation began as far back as January, but actual mine sweeps in Iraqi waterways could not begin until U.S. forces entered Iraq.

Over the past week, O'Moore said, countermine forces have charted a 200-yard mine-free channel through the Kahwr Abd Allah River. Naval Special Clearance Team One opened the port while fighting was still going on around them. In another two weeks, all 11 berths in the port should be open and the river channel should be from 400 to 1,000 yards wide. Only five suspected mines have been found, and they have been detonated.

Lt. Cmdr. John McKelvy, tactical support operations officer for Mine Countermeasures Squadron 3, says checking a river for mines is painstaking work. Ships only travel a few knots per hour up the river, trailing acoustic, magnetic and sonar sensors.

Over one square mile, the ship will typically make about four contacts with items that could be mines. The ship must stop every time and take a closer look with underwater cameras. If the object cannot be positively identified, it is blown up. McKelvy said the slow nature of such operations often frustrates military commanders, but he says the worst mistake countermine operators can make is to be "encouraged."

"Even if we find 999 mines and a ship hits one, we didn't do our job," McKelvy says.

Detecting mines in the shallow waters of the port itself presents its own set of challenges. Here, divers must investigate most contacts with suspected mines. The currents of the river can move as fast as four knots per hour, well above the one to one-and-a-half knots divers can swim in. So the divers can only operate in certain tidal windows, when the currents are favorable. When they can work, divers must sometimes push through as much as two feet of silt to locate mines.

Naval Special Clearance Team One Command Master Chief Kurt Nelson said the Iraqis have also become smarter about how they place mines, moving away from the traditional Soviet technique of deep-water mining to placing the devices in and around harbors and shallow waterways. "This is a much more difficult operation" than in 1991, when more than 1,000 mines were found in the Persian Gulf, Nelson said.