Personnel
Ernest (Ernie) Moore, BEM
Senior Project Manager
Ernie Moore served with the Royal Australian Air Force for 39 years in the armament engineering, explosives and guided weapons fields. He has undertaken extensive training in the Explosive Ordnance Demolition (EOD) field, including advanced explosives courses at the Royal Military College of Science at Schrivenham, UK, specialist training at the Defence EOD School UK and the Defence NBC School, UK and related training with the Royal Australian Navy and Australian Army. He has served in numerous positions related to ammunition storage and disposal including in Malaysia and Vietnam and was awarded the British Empire Medal in recognition of his exemplary service. He reached the rank of Wing Commander and retired in 1991.
He has broad and practical experience in the clearance of cluster weapon impact areas, weapons load recovery from crashed aircraft, development of EOD techniques, management of comprehensive clearance surveys of RAAF weapons ranges, clearance of WW 2 chemical weapon storage sites and broad instructional experience.
Ernie joined Milsearch in 1991 and is responsible for Milsearch's Queensland office. During 1995 and 1996, Mr Moore conducted both UXO sampling and UXO remediation tasks in the heavily contaminated northern provinces of Lao PDR. He conducted a coarse 2% statistical UXO sampling of some 240 kilometres of road alignment straddling the Plain of Jars, the site of continuous land battles and USAF interdiction strikes for some nine years during the 'secret' war in Laos. This sampling provided sufficient data for the confident costing to within +/- 20% for clearance work necessary to construct future roads for the ADB funded Xieng Khouang Road Redevelopment Project.
Mr Moore has also conducted a major UXO clearance task clearing an 11 m wide easement along 100 kilometres of National Route 6 leading to the wartime Communist Pathet Lao Headquarters at Xam Neua near the Vietnam border. This contract was awarded to Milsearch on a competitive basis by the German Government's international aid organization Kreditstastalt Fur Wiederaufbau.
He has also completed significant contamination assessments and subsequent route clearances for the Japanese Government development assistance organization JICA. This work was designed to allow safe construction of a 76 km segment of National Highway 9, which connects Thailand with Vietnam via Lao PDR and passes through the wartime Ho Chi Minh Trail.
More recently, Mr Moore completed a technically difficult site clearance for British Petroleum in Vung Tau Baria province to support the construction by Siemens-Leighton Asia of the Phu My 3 Gas Power Station. This task involved the sub-contracting of Vietnamese Army search elements and a 100% digital imaging magnetometer survey.