Europe's Largest Ever Disaster Response Exercise Was Expertly Monitored by Grundig Salzburg in Austria recently played host to the largest disaster response exercise ever undertaken in Europe; codename Operation Taranis. The EU co-funded project took place in June 2013.

The premise of the exercise was that severe storms and rain in Salzburg and its surrounding area had caused landslides, buildings to collapse and flooding. This had also led to a number of train and boat disasters. In addition, there was a plane crash at the airport and chemical leaks at two nearby towns. National emergency response vehicles were deployed for many weeks. The Austrian Minister for the Interior and the Salzburg authorities then decided to deploy additional support from the international EU civil protection response system. In total, 900 emergency response units from seven different countries attended 22 different, hypothetical emergency incidents, over 3 days.

The company responsible for Operation Taranis and its organization was Excon. They appointed LaBoe Security OG to provide remote viewing, transmission and monitoring of all the incidents and the responses.

Despite the huge scale of the operation, each of the 22 incidents was monitored in real-time. Full HD, IP cameras from Grundig provided the images and VMS software from Alnet Systems provided control. The cameras were mounted on hydraulic, telescopic masts and powered by batteries. Their HD images were transmitted using wireless IP technology, by fibre optic network or by a 3G mobile network. A walk-in observation room contained many Grundig Full HD monitors along with three video walls. Each incident was also remotely monitored by the EU commission in Brussels, the Red Cross headquarters in Salzburg and at Excon's HQ.

Exercise Director and Salzburg's "security commissioner", Anton Holzer, concluded, "All the teams have excelled in providing an outstanding emergency response. They demonstrated a high level of competence and effective, cooperative communications. They not only carried out their difficult tasks with great professionalism and competence, but also with passion and enthusiasm".

The exercises were a great success and provided reassurance that the emergency response to any unprecedented EU disaster would be fast, highly competent and effective. Grundig IP cameras and monitors impressed all the agencies involved with their image quality, both day and night.