Europe on standby to fight summer emergencies

By David Cronin

Date: 29/07/04

AN EMERGENCY unit in the European Commission will be staffed 24 hours per day throughout August to deal with any disasters marring the holiday season.

In the past two summers, Europe has been hit by major crises, widely attributed to climate change.

A record heatwave in 2003 cost an estimated 35,000 lives while, in 2002, parts of central Europe grappled with the worst floods since records began.

This year, the focus is on forest fires.

A forecast provided to the Commission's Monitoring and Information Centre (MIC) indicates there is a "very high" risk of forest fires in southern France, the Iberian peninsula, Turkey's Anatolia region, Cyprus, parts of the Balkans and north Africa.

The assessment has been made with the aid of satellite images from France's meteorology service.

The MIC has already been busy this week with the forest fires that engulfed Portugal's Algarve and Alentejo regions, as well as the Serra da Arrabida mountains south of Lisbon.

On Monday (26 July), the Portuguese authorities asked it to issue a plea for help. Seven states responded to the appeal and Lisbon accepted fire-fighting aircraft from Greece and Italy.

Commission sources say that at least two officials will be on permanent duty at the MIC in the coming months, with the possibility of calling on a 20-strong team if a major emergency occurs.

Member states can report an emergency and stipulate whether they wish the MIC to play a coordinating role in the response.

Commission spokeswoman Ewa Hedlund said: "The keywords here are solidarity and subsidiarity. Everybody has to help each other but, at the same time, civil protection is primarily a question for each member state."

In a paper published in March, the Commission acknowledged that the MIC database is "fairly basic".

Its deficiency was illustrated when severe flooding hit the south of France last December and the French authorities needed high-capacity pumps. On that occasion, the database only had details of one country which had such pumps and precise technical specifications were not stored on it.

To try to beef up its civil protection capacities, the Commission has pledged to set up an additional emergency communication and information system by the end of this year.

This is designed to facilitate a more routine sharing of information between member states and the Commission on emergencies.

In the past two years, the MIC's activities have ranged from seeking ships and aircraft, to aid rescue workers grappling with the Prestige oil disaster off the coast of Galicia, to handling a request for assistance transporting the corpses of those killed in a 2002 Senegalese ferry disaster.