The members of the PREDICT consortium gathered in the city of Helsinki on 14 and 15 September 2016 to take stock of the project's progress and visit Finnish crisis management command centres. During a visit arranged by the Finnish Environment institute SYKE - a partner in the consortium - members of the project were able to engage with several Finnish Command centers - at the Helsinki City Rescue Department and at the National Border Guard Agency - to see how in Finland the situational awareness picture are build up and how different authorities communicate during maritime accidents.
BORIS (Baltic Oil Response Information System) - a GIS for oil spill response hosted by SYKE - has also been presented during the visit. BORIS provides a common situation awareness system for Finnish authorities participating in oil spill response. This tool is managed by SYKE. Using BORIS, crisis management officials can also access up-to-date information e.g. on the extent of oil spills, calculate future movements of the oil and plan response measures directly on a map interface.
Lastly, the members of the PREDICT project were given a short introduction to the european HAZARD project that aims at mitigating the effects of emergencies in major seaports in the Baltic Sea Region. More information on this project is avalaible here: https://blogit.utu.fi/hazard/
About the Finnish Predict 2016 exercise
Finnish Environment Institute SYKE organized, together with other Finnish oil and chemical response authorities this year´s biggest national oil and chemical spill response exercise outside Helsinki on 12.-15.09.2016. According to the scenario a container ship grounded which resulted first to a 500m3 oil leak. The situation escalated and the scenario for the second day was chemical spills on the deck of casualty. In addition containers with dangerous chemical inside were lost to the sea and they eventually sunk. The exercise was arranged under umbrella of Predict project.
Five state multipurpose vessels and 10 oil spill response boat from the City of Helsinki as well as private tugboats and other ship equipment were participating in the exercise. Finnish Border Guard´s Dornier aircarft made surveillance flights and SuperPuma helicopter transported the chemical divers to the casualty. The main themes in the exercise was the co-operation of the different authorizes, data collection and risk assessment, building the situational picture, oil recovery operations with multipurpose vessels and shoreline protection with booms, seeking of lost containers, chemical diving etc. About 350 people from several different organizations were involved in the exercise.
© Pirttijärvi, SYKE