AMID POLITICAL GRIDLOCK and the macabre reality that sees more landmines laid than cleared each year, a former banker holds in his Causeway Bay office what he believes to be a pragmatic partial solution: a unique combat boot designed to reduce the damage caused by anti-personnel explosives.
The United Nations estimates 100 million uncleared landmines occupy one-third of the countries in the developing world. Claiming more than 500 victims a week, landmines are a weapon of mass destruction in slow motion, an 'invisible Goliath' detonated one step at a time, failing to discriminate between the foot of a soldier or that of a child.
The patented Blast and Fragment Resistant (BfR) boot ('making your next step safer') has 13 shock-absorbing layers in the sole that combine to create a tensile strength greater than that of steel, says FK Lee, chairman and CEO of its manufacturer BfR.
Lee makes no claim that a soldier will walk away from a blast but he believes the boot will mitigate softtissue and skeletal damage, possibly saving the wearer the added agony and trauma of amputation.
Independent tests conducted earlier this month for the first time appear to have corroborated BfR's assertions. In tests using mannequins, Britain's Royal Military College of Sciences found the BfR boots resisted up to 70 grams of explosives, double the amount used in an anti-personnel landmine, says Lee.