The European continent is surrounded by seawater, and in all these areas there are heavy traffic of passenger ferries/cruise, cargo boat and oil tankers. An accident with one or more ships in open sea will nearly always involve a range of different operations like rescue people, prevent oil-spill, secure values with several different countries involved. Rescue operations and oil spill collection require cooperation between national authorities in different countries and a range of organizations like the coast guard, military rescue units, civil rescue units and the national rescue centres when people are involved.
Held at the 27th September and organised by the University of South-Eastern Norway, Use Case 4 (Rescue of people and collection of pollution on sea in international waters), a cross-border exercise involving Norway, Netherlands and Denmark was executed as part of the VALKYRIES project. This was the final exercise of the project.
The exercise started with a passenger ship hitting an oil container. This triggered a rescue operation. A drone began a search for victims of the accident, reporting its location to the emergency services.
Once victims were located, a boat proceed to rescue the victims.
In turn, specialised teams proceed to remove the spill from the sea.
During the rescue operation, the emergency services were able to obtain the COP using tools develop by the Valkyries project, including PARTICLE AWARE Common Operational Picture and PARTICLE Asset and Staff Mobile Application tools. 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
PARTICLE also introduced a Mobile Application allowing tracking status and location of assets and staff. This Application brought a realistic setting to the use case, providing real-time location updates, visible in PARTICLE Globa-COP.
As a result of the joint efforts of the three organizing countries, the maritime rescue exercise was successfully conducted.
The drill was well attended by international observers from Colombia, Ghana, Uganda and Lebanon.
