The real-time exercise recently performed in Vietnam by UNITAR/UNOSAT and their partners during the first week of May was successful.

  The purpose of the exercise was to evaluate the support of TANGO solutions for telecom equipment and services (www.teladnetgo.eu) in a typical RESPOND scenario (GMES services supporting humanitarian relief, Disaster Reduction and reconstruction - www.respond-int.org) dealing with preparedness and crisis response in the case of floods disaster event. TANGO provided support to field team activities with portable Satcom equipments integrating technologies for voice and data communications, and providing also GIS capabilities.   The team was composed by UNOSAT experts in charge of the coordination of the demonstration, Infoterra France, in charge of the Eliseo tool, and EADS Astrium, the TANGO project coordinator. Tasks carried out within the demonstration in Hue were also efficiently supported by the Vietnam National University, Hanoi, as well as the Bureau of Government, Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Defense, People’s Committee of Thua Thien Hue Province, Science and Technology Service of Thua Thien Hue province, Hue University, Hue Center of Information Technology,  without which the demonstration would not have been such a successful.   Two “operational” crisis scenarios were used for the demonstration. In the first scenario, the Hue city area is flooded due to monsoon rains and the team has to identify flooded areas, safe areas, and ways to evacuate the affected population. In the second scenario, the landfall of a typhoon causes the flooding of the lagoon area in the Hue region and the team has to identify the flooded areas and status roads. Two teams were established, one for each scenario.   Participants worked for two days on a geographic area confined by the sea, river, mountains and the beach to identify the areas potentially flooded, the safe areas nearby, and how to evacuate the affected population. The boundaries of these areas were drawn including the road network using the Eliseo tool and the information was transmitted to the Command Center located in the Hue City. The Command Center, after coordination of data collection, retransmitted the filtered data to RESPOND HQs located in Europe through satcom links. After processing the data available, the RESPOND team in Europe sent back to the field the maps necessary to coordinate the operations of rescue teams.   The results of the demonstration were highly appreciated by the Vietnamese authorities during the debriefings in Hue and Hanoi, opening the concrete possibility of future collaborations. The Vietnamese authorities underlined that satellite telecommunications associated to geospatial data as in the case of the TANGO project play an important role in monitoring risk, responding to crises and bringing more efficiency in disaster management.   The demonstration team benefited from support from Inmarsat for the satellite bandwidth service provision and from Ansur Technologies of Norway for the ASIGN Image Communications Solution. The BGAN and ELISEO telecom equipments have worked without failures including under torrential rain in Hanoi.