ASSISTING FIRST RESPONDERS IN WATER-BORNE HAZARDS IN NORTHERN GREECE THROUGH PATHOCERT SOLUTIONS

As water is a valuable and indispensable ingredient of life, drinking water’s safety is extremely important both for ensuring consumers’ health and for the proper functioning of the ecosystem. The implementation of new technologies aiming to ensure that water quality and monitoring in water utilities lies in compliance with current EU and national standards, prove very promising for enhancing risk assessment processes and management of water supply systems. The overall objective of the PathoCERT project is to strengthen the coordination capability of the first responders in handling waterborne pathogen contamination events, allowing the rapid and accurate detection of pathogens, improving their situational awareness and their ability to control and mitigate emergency situations involving waterborne pathogens. The developed methodologies involve the processing of a vast amount of data of different sources; PathoSAT collects data and images from satellites, analyse them to identify water contaminations and their extent and relays them to PathoCERT’s platform. PathoTWEET analyses data and photos from social media to assess the occurrence, severity and extent of water contamination events. To align PathoCERT’s various components with the needs of the first responders, three Community of Practice (CoP) meetings were organized, where the scenarios are formed based on the usability of the presented technologies.