Guarding Hamburg Against Biohazards: BMBF Funding for Drills

Photo: iStock/Reinhard Krull

The Elbe project is a biological hazards response training for emergency services and responsible institutions.

Whether a highly contagious disease outbreak on a ship in the port of Hamburg or an accident in a biotech laboratory: fire departments, emergency services, and police need to collaborate closely with the health authorities at all government levels to investigate the situation, care for the sick, and prevent possible spread.

In the project Einsatzführung und Lagebewältigung bei Biogefahren-Ereignissen (operational command and response to biohazard incidents, ELBE), the Hamburg Fire Department, the municipal Institut für Hygiene und Umwelt (institute for hygiene and environment) and the Fachamt Gesundheit (office of public health) of the district of Altona together with a University of Hamburg team and other associated partners investigate how to improve this collaboration. ELBE will receive roughly €2 million in funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the Research for Civil Security program.

Participants will conduct multistage drills with increasing complexity. The interaction between emergency services, laboratories, and crisis management teams will be closely monitored and scientifically evaluated by the Interdisciplinary Research Group for the Analysis of Biological Risks (INFABRI) of the Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker Center for Science and Peace Research at the University of Hamburg.

Methods from various disciplines, such as organizational theory and risk research, will be used to evaluate results and design optimal processes. Furthermore, sociological approaches will be applied to analyze the cooperation between the teams. The findings will be reported back directly: After each exercise, the crisis management concepts of the various authorities will be improved and aligned. To ensure other regions will also benefit from the project results, model crisis management plans for a joint response to biohazard situations will be developed and made available nationwide.

“Our interdisciplinary team provides our practical partners with advanced crisis management research findings for every step of the project. We are also in charge of monitoring and evaluating the drills. This is the directest science-to-practice transfer,” says team leader Dr. Gunnar Jeremias. We could thus devise concrete, holistic and, above all, coordinated guidelines to improve collaboration in the event of a disaster.