E-PreS: Monitoring and Evaluation of Natural Hazard Preparedness at School Environment
E-PreS project (Monitoring and Evaluation of Natural Hazard Preparedness at School Environment) is thus addressed to the prevention phase against natural hazards. The main goal of E-PreS is the design and evaluation of drills and exercises that are an extremely important part of emergencies mitigation. It will help school staff and students to understand any hazard effect and be prepared to react appropriately. The main objectives of the project are:
- to identify, share and implement best practices and methodologies gained from previous EU projects and partners activities;
- to create smart tools which define, simulate and evaluate all hazards emergency steps and be customized to the unique district, school, and campus;
- to involve the collaboration of interested parties and to include pupils with disabilities and special needs.
Expected results
The project will come up with a holistic methodology for the real-time evaluation of prevention measures involving different categories of actors, districts, steps and metrics. By providing a clear architecture, precisely defining the roles of actors and a common multi-language portal and in-field dynamic assessment module, EPreS will allow newcomers to add new steps during a drill or training where the necessary spatial and sensor information is available. This drastically facilitates value-addition to the knowledge extraction about the outcome of a drill and shortens the time to do so. The proposed project will have impact in terms of:
- Facilitating the drill preparations and checklist for developing an evacuation plan by determining whatsteps need to be taken and in what order. The aforementioned involves the insertion of the pre-defined evacuation guidelines that should be followed upon a hazard event occurrence, e.g., the residents of room X should move through the corridor K, proceed to gate L and use the external emergency stairway to the ground floor. Each plan is adaptable to the unique district and user requirements.
- Testing the total emergency response plan as a "simulated" exercise. When the drill is kick-started, the system monitors the exact location of human subjects and keeps detailed logs on the training activity.
- Increasing the effectiveness and functioning of prevention plan. A supervisor should be able to specify a priori the metrics and the baseline figures for a successful exercise (e.g., the human flux through gate A should never reach the number of X person/min, the time from room Y to mustering station W should be less than C min). After the performance of the drill the recorded activity is assessed against the adopted metrics/figures. The output of this activity is a total degree for the fulfilment of the drill objectives.