Interior Minister Daniel Lipšic said a new concept in the organisation, running and development of Slovakia’s Integrated Rescue System (IZS) will lead to substantial reform of IZS which he said has many shortcomings at this time, the TASR newswire reported.
"It often occurred that individual rescue units were unable to communicate because they don't use the same type of walkie-talkies, for example. Health rescuers communicate using different technologies than fire brigades and the police do. We want to harmonise this," said Lipšic about the reforms approved by the government on January 19.
Lipšic added that coordination call centres which receive distress calls are to be interconnected more efficiently. There will be eight centres and all of them will be well-equipped to locate callers thanks to a satellite navigation system. A pilot project will be tested later this year in Prešov Region.
In addition Lipšic said that during natural disasters such as floods people in affected areas will receive text messages if their mobile phone is located in an affected area, saying that this is to make sure that people in danger do not need to rely on information from what he called obsolete technologies such as municipal public address systems.
Source: TASR
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
The Slovak Spectator cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information presented in its Flash News postings.
