CBSS Secretariat’s Civil Protection team participated in a kick-off meeting of the new project, FIRE-IN, set to improve national and European fire and rescue capability development. FIRE-IN has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme and consists of 16 partners from 8 European countries, representing research, practitioners, governmental agencies and business. Within the next 5 years the project will identify fire and rescue practitioners’ requirements and needs to connect them with relevant innovative technologies. The results will be shared among hundreds of experts and professional networks from the whole Europe through an innovative e-FIRE-IN platform. The task of the CBSS, represented in the kick-off meeting by Adviser Jacek Paszkowski and Project officer Andriy Martynenko, is to build a bridge between the Baltic Sea Region fire and rescue services and the project and to devise FIRE-IN communication tools. The expectations for the project are high: sound project method and the joint expertise of the partners will help saving costs and optimize R&D investments, reduce implementation time of the new fire-fighting technologies, simplify international collaboration between the practitioners, and ultimately make Europe and the Baltic Sea Region a safer place.
