Hydra Minerva Suite

The management of major incidents, anything from plane crashes to the search for a missing child, can now be authentically recreated and experienced thanks to our state-of-the-art simulation suite.

The training suite is one of the most sophisticated university installation in the country and one of the very few in UK universities to mirror the specification and complexity of the most advanced systems used by police forces and other emergency services across the UK and abroad.

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.

Detailed information

Location

The Hydra Minerva Suite can be found in 042 - 044c of the Maudland Building