4th VALKYRIES NEWSLETTER
SEPTEMBER 2023
The emergency medical system has a unique role when deployed as first aid response on disaster situations, where Multi-Casualty Incidents (MCI) tend to reveal resource insufficiency (rescue personnel, healthcare providers, facilities, etc.), significant breakdowns in the local health care facilities usually damaged or destroyed, malfunctioning communication infrastructure and the jeopardized ability to deliver additional resources. In order to address these situations and related ones, the different EU emergency teams have been quick to adopt the latest technological advances, such as digitalization, new generation communication networks, drones, etc., which have led to new opportunities for procedural and collaborative improvements. However, given the rapid proliferation of new related opportunities, their implementation often significantly precedes their standardization, leading to different intersecting practices. This reduced cross-border collaboration opportunities and difficult to define, schedule and enforce joint lines of industrial and research development able to bring common disruptive solutions to the EU response teams.
The challenge of this project is to analyse these gaps for then designing key pre-standardization and harmonization actions to be implemented in a reference integration platform and demonstrated in four different cross-border and cross-sectorial scenarios.
The consortium is coordinated by Indra Sistemas S.A. and brings together 17 partners from 8 EU countries.
During the last months, the demonstration cases planned in the Valkyries project have been carried out, a great deployment of resources that has been a great challenge and where the tools developed by the Valkyries project have been tested with great success.
The 4th of May 2023 the first demonstration took place. A simulated thunderstorm that would cause several fires outbreaks and would trigger the response of first responders.
Around 400 personnel from various emergency services participated, including SUMMA112, UME, SES, HESE, Portuguese Civil Protection, Red Cross Extremadura, DYA Extremadura, Civil Protection Extremadura, Extremadura Firefighters, and 112 Extremadura.
The exercise tested the interoperability of consortium technology tools via Sigrun, facilitating cross-border coordination and real-time monitoring, ensuring effective decision-making. The drill achieved 100% victim traceability, showcasing Valkyries' solutions.
The 14th de June 2023, the city of Stupava hosted the Use Case 3, an earthquake drill at the Bulgarian-Greek border. More than 130 participants were part of the exercise.
This demonstration involved the participation of members of the Bulgarian Fire Service, the Bulgarian Military Medical Academy, cadets from the Bulgarian National Defense University, local authorities in Sandanski, the Bulgarian Police, the Hellenic Rescue Team, the Helenic Fire Service, the Hellenic Emergency Medical Service and the Bulgarian Police Academy (firefighters).
The drill would start with the National institute of geophysics, geodesy and geography of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences reporting data for an earthquake, with magnitude of 6.9 on the Richter scale, to the National Operating Centre of the General Directorate of Fire Safety and Civil Protectiona. During this exercise, emergency services had to deal with the devastating effects of the simulated earthquake, testing their ability to locate and triage the victims.
Use case 4 took place the 27th of September 2023 in Norway and it was probably the most challenging use case, as the actions happened on the sea. More than 500 personnel and three countries, Norway, Denmark and Sweden worked together in a sea rescue and spill recovery operation.
This demonstration involved the participation of members of different rescue services from Norway, Denmark and Sweden, as well as members of the USN and the Norwegian RS. The drill was well attended by international observers from Colombia, Ghana, Uganda and Lebanon.
The exercise started with a passenger ship hitting an oil container, triggering a rescue operation. A drone began the search for victims of the accident and reported its location to the emergency services. With this information, a boat was deployed to rescue the victims. At the same time, a number of ships would be sent to clean up the oil on the surface of the sea.
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2021 | This project has received funding from the European Union´s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement:
Nº 101020676
