On 26th October, the Vas County Disaster Management Directorate held a national recertification exercise for volunteer rescue organisations in preparation for the protection against water damage and the consequences of stormy weather, and with that a field exercise for the implementation of the Pilot tasks set within the Interreg CENTRAL EUROPE LOCALIENCE project.
The exercise was based on a supposed damage event – days of rain and subsequent stormy weather. The sudden heavy rainfall caused a significant rise in the level of the river Rába and its tributaries. The rainfall was accompanied by a supercell, which caused significant damage to infrastructure in the sub-region.
The complexity of the exercise was that, in addition to five district and six municipal rescue organisations working to obtain their new national certification for five years, it was also a field exercise organised to implement the Pilot tasks of the Interreg CENTRAL EUROPE LOCALIENCE project. All this is a continuation of the cooperation started earlier, in order to develop cross-border activities in the fields of disaster prevention, civil protection, fire prevention and industrial accident prevention.
The participants of the exercise were addressed by Dr. Balázs Bognár, Brigadier General, Director of the Vas County Disaster Management Directorate and Deputy President of the Vas County Regional Defence Committee. In his speech, he stressed that the exercise was being carried out in the framework of the Interreg CENTRAL EUROPE LOCALIENCE project, in which the directorate had undertaken to develop an extreme weather catalogue.
After the opening ceremony, the work started on the sites. The response teams had to carry out various water damage and storm damage prevention, public protection and logistical tasks across the territory of the municipality.