Essex Fire & Rescue Hydra Suite

    • Essex Fire and Rescue Hydra Suite Plenary Room
    • Essex Fire and Rescue Hydra Suite Control Room

Essex County Fire and Rescue Service have recently taken ownership of their all new Hydra Minerva Training Facility, based at Essex County Fire and Rescue Services Headquarters at Kelvedon Park. This is an extensive upgrade on the older Hydra Facility that was already in place at our older premise in Basildon, which had been running Hydra Software since 2006. The new suite has brought with it all new technologies to assist in the safe learning environment that is Hydra, and will enable us to make the learning experience more immersive than we have had in previous exercises.

The building was handed over to Essex County Fire and Rescue Service on the 4th July 2014, and the facilitators alongside the help of the Hydra team have been working hard in collaboration to make this facility operational and ready for Hydra Exercises. We are fortunate enough to benefit from newer technologies such as monitoring systems controlled by iPad’s, CCTV systems with pan tilt zoom capabilities and microphones that allow you to hear even the quietest of people. The basis of our facility was to promote and encourage joint working with other Hydra Suites within the Hydra Forum, and more locally support multi agency working within purpose built Hydra Exercises, whilst also opening our doors to organisations that don’t have the benefits of such an advanced Hydra Suite, and introducing them into the world of Hydra.

Our facility has already offered its services to participate in the trial of the new version of Hydra Cloud, as we are fortunate enough to have a potential 10 syndicate rooms within our facility, making use of the newly talked about facilities within the Hydra Cloud software of extensive syndicate working.

Our suite currently has the following facilities.

 

  • 9x Separate Syndicate Rooms
  • 1x Large Plenary room (which has the ability to be split into two rooms, enabling the 10th Syndicate Room)
  • 1x Control / Monitoring Room
  • 1x Driving / Staging Room
  • 1x Incident Command Unit, with connection for Hydra 

 

If you would like to make contact with anyone at our Hydra Facility, please do not hesitate to use the contact details provided.

Key Contact Numbers for the Hydra Team at Essex Fire & Rescue:

Name Title Phone Email
Trevor Hearn   Assistant Divisional Officer - Incident Command Training Manager  
Daniel Davis    Training Officer - Hydra Suite Technician 01376 576532
       

Suite Manager: Costa Olymbios

Email: [email protected]

Contact Number: 01376 576531

Address: Kelvedon Park, London Road, Rivenhall, Witham, CM8 3HB