Developed by the National Centre for Applied Learning Technologies and known as Hydra/Minerva, the training simulator realistically recreates the sights, sounds, radio messages and telephone calls of crisis situations.
Including hardware and software the University has invested over £350,000 in the facility which incorporates a control centre, a major incident conference room together with additional rooms for student teams to develop and direct incident strategy, tactics and operations. Emergency scenarios could range from twenty minutes to several days and between one and thirty students can use the facility at any given time.
The facility is open to all disciplines, but was originally designed for ‘Blue Light’ emergency responders and as such is used throughout Britain, N. Ireland and now abroad in Australia, Canada and the United States of America.
On campus, the facility was created for use by students within the Policing, Forensic, Business, Sports and Psychology discipline areas.
