DRIVER+ Netherlands Trial was organised by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Safety Region Haaglanden (SRH). It was conducted as a tabletop Trial at the premises of SRH in The Hague from Tuesday 21 May 2019 to Thursday 23rd May 2019.

The Scenario: A Flood in The Hague

Severe weather causes the Scheveningen lock to fail, flooding The Hague city centre, putting more than 500,000 people at risk.  Cascade effects were: (partial) loss of electricity, gas, drinking water, telecoms networks and damage to roads, houses, cars, shops, tram lines.

The scenario required decisions about the necessity for evacuation of inhabitants of the area afflicted by flooding. A large amount of emergency workers and rescue equipment was needed to deal with the increasing number of exposed people and to manage aforementioned cascading effects. Thus, the situation could not be handled by Safety Region Haaglanden and regional crisis partners only, but required deployment of additional evacuation forces, volunteers and resources from national and potentially international networks.

The Actors Involved

Crisis Management practitioners of several different disciplines (fire service, police, health service, military defence, water utility, municipality) were involved in order to work with and evaluate a number of innovative technical solutions to assess whether they improve practitioner response to a severe flooding incident.

The Objectives

•  Enhance the capability to plan and coordinate resources for response
• Improve the ability to exchange crisis-related information
• Facilitate the planning and management of large scale evacuation of population