Introducing the Office – Danish Civil Protection League (3/3)

At the Danish Civil Protection League, we are a secretariat of 13 people supporting the whole organization and working on our various national and EU projects. In the OIL SPILL team, we have Niels Mørup and Kia Petersen.

Niels has been in the field of fire and rescue services for many years in different jobs as manager and fire chief in both Danish Emergency Management Agency, municipal fire and rescue services, and the private sector. Niels has been part of the OIL SPILL project from the beginning.

“I hope that through OIL SPILL, we can create better practices and share them across all of the Baltic Sea. I also hope that we continue to cooperate and share knowledge so we can keep on learning from each other.”

Unlike Niels, Kia is new in the project:

“I started at DCPL in February 2020 as a project employee, looking very much forward to work on OIL SPILL and with the many Partners. Currently, I spend most of my work hours on OIL SPILL, and am very pleased to be part of it. Besides OIL SPILL, I work on a one-year project called ReSit, which focuses on volunteers in fire and rescue services in general in the Baltic Sea Region.”

Already in the beginning of March 2020, Kia participated as an observer in the OIL SPILL tabletop exercise in Finland, where volunteer leaders from the Finnish Voluntary Rescue Service (Vapepa) practiced coordination and cooperation during an oil spill accident.

“I particularly find it interesting that so many different actors cooperate during an oil spill response in Finland and how the Vapepa network coordinates the volunteer activities. I look very much forward to see how oil spill response will be organized at the Vellamo exercise when the participants come not only from different organizations but from different countries as well.”

A great part of this spring will be spent on the planning of the communication and networking event DCPL is arranging with Southwest Finland Emergency Service, but also on the planning of our participation in the Vellamo exercise.

“We are thrilled that some of our great volunteers are given the opportunity to participate in the exercise. In Vellamo, they can practice not only the oil spill response but cross-border cooperation too. It is also a great possibility to create new friendships that can inspire and contribute to more joint-exercises in the future.”

Text: Kia Petersen / DCPL