Succesful ASSISTANCE Pilot 2 demonstration in Rotterdam

In the last week of March 2022, ASSISTANCE second pilot demonstration has been performed in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The event has been organised and hosted by Gezamenlijke Brandweer (GB) at the GB RDM training centre and attended by all partners.

The demonstration session has been originally planned to encompass five days, starting with non-technical excercises of various First responders and VR training sessions. In parallel the technical team was preparing the ASSISTANCE system for a dry run and final demonstration that was to be incorporated into the practictioners  field excercise. As the weather forecast has predicted snow over Rotterdam for the last day, all the activities were re-planned to be performed in four days and the dry-run day was the day of the actual demonstration.

Owing to an excellent organisation by the host and engagement of the participating partners, the event was performed succesfully, even though the weather conditions have forced the ASSISTANCE team to finish the event one day earlier.

Overall, the Pilot 2 excercise has been performed from 28th March until 30th March 2022.

The action of the demonstration was based on an industrial accident scenario, that begins withan incident on a petrochemical area of 5,3 km2 and a little fire in a transformer:  A big flash is coming outside the transformer. Everything is suddenly dark, Emergency Shutdown (ESD) is operational. The Flair is working and big flames about 50 till 60 meters are on top of the Flair. There is a lot of black smoke. In addition, a leakage of the gas SF6 (Sulfur hexafluoride) is suspected, which decomposes in the highly dangerous gases SO2 (sulfur dioxide) and HF (Hydrogen fluoride).

The ASSISTANCE use cases/capabilities envisaged for the scenario have been deployed and tested during the Pilot 2 demonstration with a positive outcome.