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Exercise Oasis aims to improve interoperability across the EU
Exercise Oasis is a four-year EU sponsored programme that has seen industry, academia and research institutions join with the emergency services to find solutions to interoperability across Europe and the UK. It is being heralded as the foundation to a European Emergency Response system.
Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service is involved in the scheme that will help integrate Europe’s diverse emergency response systems by making information instantly available to fire, police and ambulance control rooms.
Fire officers and control room operators from Shrewsbury HQ joined a 60 strong fire, police and ambulance contingent from across the EU to trial a state of the art computer software system designed for cross border management of disasters.
Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service joined the programme at the first meeting held at the Defence Capability Centre at Shrivenham, near Swindon, to trial the prototype software nearly two years ago. On that occasion three officers from Shrewsbury joined with ambulance and police officers to test the software’s ability to allow them to quickly swap information among all three emergency services in a disaster scenario.
Area Manager Jim Cameron, head of Fire Control and Convergence at Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service, said the Oasis programme could well be the face of future crisis management systems if it gets full EU financial backing.
“We do lose precious minutes in communicating with other emergency services. With this new programme, information sharing is instant, not only among emergency services in the UK but with our colleagues across Europe.
“It allows us to communicate using predefined codes so that everyone knows or has access to what is going on despite language differences. It is a truly remarkable system.”
A trial in Shropshire in April 2008 demonstrated cross service interoperability at a series of simulated road traffic incidents in which initial inaccurate accident details were corrected and quickly shared among the emergency services leading to vitally important time savings.
Further trials were held in a remote area of Romania in May where information on a flooding disaster was broadcast from a mobile unit via satellite to organise the emergency response using the Oasis system. Another exercise was held in the Czech Republic in June involving a major flood – the most probable crisis for the country.
In the Shropshire trials there were five traffic scenarios culminating in a “complex” incident in which a car thief and five others suffered burns when the car crashed into a bus stop. The crash triggered off major public order incidents in which houses were set on fire and an ambulance stoned with a near riot developing.
Fire, ambulance and police control operators linked information about the developing incidents via computer as silver command across all three services accessed the information remotely from home to get an over view and successfully resolve the crisis.
Alex Wakeley from Shrewsbury fire and rescue said: “Having the information via Oasis meant that we didn’t have to phone around to find out information from ambulance and police, so it was a great help.”
A final trial will take place at Versailles near Paris in October.
A video of some of the training incidents can be watched here (links to Youtube).
