Last week, our project completed another important milestone in Ipswich, one of the oldest cities in UK, and an area under the risk of severe floods that still remembers the “cold night of terror” of 1953 when a huge flood took the lives of 41 people. In this setting, our industrial partner Aquobex hosted a two-day meeting in which we were able to interact with different potential end-users and test all our technologies in a real scenario.
Wednesday 13th was a day to share information and learn from many experts from different areas that accepted our invitation. The interactions were really insightful and enabled us to identify gaps, opportunities, risks and potential improvements that might be made in our products.
Thursday 14th was a day for real action in a flood simulation exercise at the Orwell river in Ipswich. In collaboration with the Environment Agency and the Suffolk Fire & Rescue Service, we successfully tested together all our tools for the very first time. Among others, we showed fully functional mobile app, wearables and smart glasses for first responders, numerous information layers for decision-makers and the app for citizens. And we were not only able to test our system but also to successfully compare it with one of the best systems available in Europe: the UK Environment Agency’s system.
After two partial demonstrations (in Sava river and in Piedmont, Italy) this third demo has shown us that the system is ready and mature enough to represent a real and complete alternative to existing systems and is already showing fully developed innovations such as the social media engine or the crowdsource information.
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