Rotterdam, October 14 2011 – Training & Simulation developer VSTEP has developed a new  ‘Forest & heath land fire’ module for its virtual emergency training platform RescueSim. This new module allows emergency services to create and train specific forest and nature fire incidents.

RescueSim is a mono- and multidisciplinary virtual training platform that prepares public safety and security professionals for real-life incidents. RescueSim allows for realistic virtual training in over 130 possible incident locations and allows emergency crews to experience the incident as they would in real-life. They assess the situation and determine the best response strategy, implement it and then observe the consequences of their decisions. RescueSim is also used for training of incidents that are too dangerous, costly or time consuming to train in real-life.

The RescueSim location library already holds more than 130 training environments, including downtown areas, ports, industrial plants, on-board of vessels, offshore installations, hospitals, prisons, railroad stations, residential areas, highways and subterranean locations including subway stations, parking garages and tunnel installations. The Forest & heathland environment is the latest addition to these realistic RescueSim training environments. 

The new module also implements RescueSim’s new intelligent smoke and fire system. In addition to the existing scalable smoke types already in RescueSim, a new ‘intelligent’ smoke type has been added. This type of smoke spreads realistically based on advanced smoke physics/dynamics and responds to external influences like helicopter rotor wash or other forces.

The forest & heathland module is developed specifically for emergency responders (fire & rescue, ambulance, police) and incident management divisions. It contains an extensive library of incident specific objects. With the intuitive Instructor Toolbox, an instructor can easily create a realistic incident scenario in a forest or heath land location.

Hans ten Bergen, VSTEP Business Development Manager: “The forest & heath land module is a new addition to RescueSim’s virtual training library. It was developed in close cooperation with our customerbase. Because of the worldwide recurring problems with forest fires, there is a significant demand by our customers for an efficient and realistic response training for these type of incidents.  Thanks to this new RescueSim module, emergency responders can train and prepare for almost any thinkable forest & heath land incident.

The new module is available for all language and localized versions of RescueSim.