The goal of the Marhetak project is to strengthen cooperation between the Euroregional services legally responsible for crisis management and weather, water and soil services in times of a flood crisis.
The South Limburg Safety Region in the form of EMRIC, the Public Service Wallonia, the Federal Public Service Interior Belgium and the Limburg Water Board will work on aligning forecast images, facilitating uniform information provision, linking data sources, harmonizing risk assessments and crisis communication. Finally, disaster response materials will be inventoried and supplemented as needed. The project concludes with a live exercise of better crisis management in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine.
Marhetak is being implemented within the framework of Interreg V-A Euregion Meuse-Rhine with 1.7 million euros support from the European Union’s European Regional Development Fund. Read more about the project here.
ITEM study: cross-border crisis management in the event of flooding in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine
At the request of the partner organizations of the EMRIC network, ITEM conducted a study within the framework of the INTERREG Project MAHRETAK on requirements of cross-border crisis management in the event of the 2021 flood. EMRIC is a unique partnership of public agencies responsible for firefighting, technical assistance, emergency response, infectious disease and disaster and crisis management in their areas. While specific areas of emergency response and disaster management are already coordinated in EMRIC, flooding as a crisis goes beyond EMRIC cooperation and requires the combination of national, regional and Euroregional levels. The purpose of the study was to examine the current situation of crisis management at the administrative and political level across the border and to discuss recommendations for the partners of this INTERREG project that could improve cross-border crisis management in the future in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine.
