The incident begins in Spain and progresses rapidly towards Portugal, affecting a Natural Park and endangering several border towns. News on the incident suggests that it is an intentional fire that threatens several urbanized areas in the middle of the mountain and with an extensive wooded area. The intensity of the fire, together with the large extension of the burned ground and the weather situation, requests the authorities to activate the regional emergency plan, requesting the intervention of the military emergency unit. Under these circumstances, coordination between different stakeholders is crucial to minimize human and material damages.
At May 4th, the first of the four Valkyries H2020 use cases took place on the border between Valencia de Alcántara, in Cáceres, and Marvao, in Portugal.
More than 400 participants, including the project team, UME, Autoridade Nacional de Emergência e Proteção Civil, Servicio Extremeño de Salud, Red Cross and Firefighters, took part in a large fire drill under the framework of the European project Valkyries H2020, led by Indra.
During the exercise, the interoperability of the tools developed by the consortium partners was tested with SIGRUN, the reference integration developed under the Valkyries H2020 project. This framework improves the synchronization of the information between the coordination centers from both countries and represents a real-time view of the fire and the accident, facilitating decision making in cross border situations.
The exercise demonstrated applications developed by the VALKYRIES consortium, which included PARTICLE Global Common Operational Picture (COP) and victim information system. PARTICLE also provided the SIGRUN interoperability platform, implemented in VALKYRIES, allowing different tools and solutions to exchange information about the incident.
PARTICLE COP provided the following functions:
- Overall dashboards for incidents and victims information
- Overall view of all incidents, assets, staff and victims
- Incident details, including assigned assets, staff and victims
- Assets and staff management and tracking
- Victims management and tracking
Stay tunned for the next use cases:
- UC#2 – Cross-border response to the disaster containing the spreading of toxic substances (Slovakia-Italy)
- UC#3 – Cross-border crisis due to an earthquake (Bulgaria-Greece)
- UC#4 – Rescue operations and oil spill collection in international waters (Norway-Netherlands-Denmark)
