Security district Zeeland keeps in touch

How can the police, fire brigade and ambulance services still communicate after land lines have been submerged and the mobile network has become inaccessible? Under these circumstances communication via satellite is the only option left. It is a conclusion shared by Veiligheidsregio Zeeland, the regional government body responsible for the coordination of emergency situations in the Netherlands’ south-western province of the same name. Putting their ideas into action the security district recently asked 2connect-IT to provide them with six emergency cases kitted out with an Inmarsat BGAN satellite system.

“Imagine a big flood rolling in from the sea and water levels rising until we’re literally knee-deep in it,” Veiligheidsregio Zeeland’s staff member Information Management Marc Nagelkerke thinks out loud. “Will we still be able to communicate under those circumstances?”
It was this question that was at the core of the 2008 project Watersnoodaanpak Veiligheidsregio Zeeland (WaVe), initiated by the Taskforce Management Overstromingen (TMO flood management task force). The project ended with the flood exercise ‘Waterproef’, in which the other Dutch coastal provinces also participated and parts of the coastal town of Terneuzen were fictitiously evacuated.
An important finding of the project and its concluding exercise was that, in the direct aftermath of a flood, regular communications facilities will soon cease to work. Nagelkerke: “Water levels in excess of sixty centimetres will mean that land lines have been drowned and crucial sections of our nationwide emergency communications network C2000, which largely depends on those very land lines, will be inaccessible. Our primary fall-back option, the UMTS network, will quickly get overburdened and become inaccessible, too. Our only recourse then will be to look up, to the satellite.”

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