Not Only in Iraq and Afghanistan ....

"If you started with 100 people on one end of our reserve ... and just worked your way north ... in ten years you would not finish."
"You know it's land of very high value and when you start looking at prices of property in the Okanagan, pretty soon you find that we're sitting on some considerable lands for development opportunities."
"They used to plow up their fields and every once in a while they'd find these tail fins ... of a mortar and take the mortar and go throw it on the rock pile. By the grace of God those things never exploded."
"What would happen if some of these developers actually hit some unexploded ordnance and what's that going to do in terms of land value?"
Chief Coun.Byron Louis, Okanagan Indian Band, British Columbia

Contractors for the Department of National Defence clear military ordinance from Okanagan Indian Band lands near Vernon, British Columbia, in 2014. THE CANADIAN PRESS/ho-Don Louis

"Until a full assessment is completed, and a mutually agreeable solution is in place, it is not possible to estimate the scope of the work to any degree of precision."
Daniel Blouin, Department of National Defence spokesman, Ottawa

The land in question, overlooking Okanagan Lake and valley is a grassland environment, typically with small lakes here and there, and mixed hardwood forest. And it is where the Okanagan Indian Bands have their reservations. By unhappy coincidence it is also where Canada's military conducted training exercises across thousands of hectares of two areas, near Vernon, B.C., on First Nations' land.

Use of the landscape for military training has resulted in an environment burdened with spent and unexploded munitions. The ordnance litters the area that was used as far back as the Boer War to the near past, to train soldiers in the correct use of such weapons used in conflict areas. Presumably the idea was to train new recruits in the safe and effective use of those weapons of war.

Unexploded ordnance has been found in various parts of B.C. over the years, including near Vernon. CBC 

Somehow, it failed to register with those making decisions on behalf of the military that safety should have been the operative concern once the training was done and over with, leading to the removal of all that detritus, rather than leaving it where it could expose civilians to the dangers inherent in live ammunition potentially left to explode at some time other than the time of the exercises being conducted.

The First and Second World Wars and the Korean war are long over. The training grounds were abandoned for use by the military. But the gear that makes war such a devastating catastrophe for opposing militaries and civilians alike, was left behind, in an inexcusably neglectful manner of determined forgetfulness.

And it is at the present time that government has set to work to remediate the land with the removal of the ordnance.

Some of the band members can even recall the training taking place in near proximity to their reserves with artillery rounds flying over the reserves landing on nearby training ranges. According to Chief Louis, one cleanup project began in August of 2004 retrieved 900 kilograms of military debris, and 26 live mortar rounds on land that was less than half a hectare in size.

In several months' time three band members are slated to travel to Texas A&M University to learn how to work safely identifying ordnance "hot spots", the training to take some 200 hours of instruction. One band member has completed training, with six additional members to follow in the next two years as part of a federal remediation plan.

Despite the multimillion-dollar cost the effort appears "woefully inadequate" in the opinion of Chief Louis. Who is contemplating the issue's slow-moving solution to making the land safe, at a time when developers have been making contact with the band.