and some more
Every live drill carries one line buried in its script: “REAL EVENT – STOP EXERCISE.” It is the command that turns a simulation back into reality the moment a genuine emergency appears. On 25 June 2026, on the beach and dunes of Rowy, none of us imagined how literal that line was about to become.
The “LIVE DRILL in Rowy 2026” joint rescue exercise brought the B-prepared philosophy out of the screen and onto the sand. In our exercise scenario, a crowded summer afternoon turns dangerous as a sudden change of weather triggers a chain of incidents, exactly the kind of situations citizens and first responders need to be ready for. Strong winds and high waves threaten swimmers; an elderly visitor faints on the shore; a man collapses in sudden cardiac arrest; another breaks a limb in an awkward, hard-to-reach spot among the dunes. For the purposes of our evaluation work, the script was deliberately built as a sequence of consecutive acts, even though, in reality, coastal emergencies rarely arrive one at a time.
The drill unfolded across these four episodes, each testing a different capability. In the first, the WOPR water-rescue lifeguards responded to a swimmer stranded roughly 100 metres offshore and unable to return to land, locating the casualty, recovering them from the water, bringing them to shore, and handing them over to the medical team. The second episode centred on an elderly visitor who fainted in the heat on the shore. The teams stabilised her and carried her to safety across the soft sand. In the third, a man lost consciousness and stopped breathing in a sudden cardiac arrest, prompting responders to assess his vital functions, begin CPR, and use an AED. The fourth saw a tourist break a limb in a difficult, hard-to-reach part of the dunes, where treatment and evacuation across the loose sand and rocks became the real challenge.
Pulling it all together took genuine inter-service coordination: the Volunteer Water Rescue Service (WOPR), the Volunteer Fire Departments of Duninowo, Objazd and Zaleskie, the Emergency Medical Services, and also the Youth Firefighting Teams (MDP), who worked alongside the professionals throughout.
Passing the skills on
For B-prepared, the heart of the day, as of the project itself, was knowledge transfer: not only between generations of rescuers, but out to the citizens themselves. Participants rotated through four topic stations (cardiopulmonary resuscitation, first aid for trauma, evacuation of people with limited mobility, and rescue-equipment familiarisation) with experienced firefighters mentoring younger members directly. At the CPR station, the technique was practised on three different training mannequins (adult, child and infant) so that no age group was left out. The guiding question at every station was a deceptively simple one: what can you do in the crucial minutes before professional help arrives?
That message landed in the most unexpected way. A local holidaymaker wandered over to join in, and the most enthusiastic participant of all turned out to be a girl of about four. It was preparedness in its purest form: the early realisation that you don’t need to panic, you just need to do what you can.
Partners on the ground
The exercise was followed on-site by colleagues from the B-prepared consortium, who joined the professional responders as observers. They were watching the operations unfold, comparing approaches across countries, and gathering good practices to feed back into the project. Observing on behalf of the consortium were:
HUN-REN SZTAKI as Coordinator and Product owner, SFC as responsible for the drill and for CDE activities, USTKA as organizer, UNIGE, LIU, HVL, UNIBWM, TUB, NSKI as observers from academia/evaluation perspective and PUI, YMAP, AutRC as observers from first responders side, EKON and eduGamitec as product owners of the B-prepared ecosystem, responsible for user behaviour analysis and continuous improvement of the knowledge base and of the LMS.
When the drill stopped being a drill
By the second day, the exercise script was almost overtaken by the real thing. A state heatwave warning was issued across the region. The B-prepared team did exactly what the project teaches: it adapted. Schedules were shifted, the most demanding outdoor activities were pulled into the cooler hours of the morning. The “live drill” had quietly become a “live dREAL.”
The team sat down for an evaluation meeting, led by our consortium partner HVL, and this is where the field event turned back into research. The aim is not to grade the responders or the rescue services; it is to compare the live drill, act by act, against our own B-prepared solution. Doing that rigorously means defining, with real precision, the critical and objective set of criteria, the evaluation methodology itself, against which a real-world exercise and a digital preparedness tool can meaningfully be measured side by side.
And the heat finally hits
On the third morning, the field walk was deliberately moved earlier to avoid heat exhaustion and sunstroke. We put the work back into the apps: the team field-tested the local IM-prepared walk as part of our ongoing app development, checking the on-site route, tasks and timing against real conditions on the very ground.
Saturday afternoon brought a change of register. As part of Ustka Municipality Day, the team swapped the observer role for engagement and joined the celebrations as exhibitors, putting VR-prepared in front of the public. Twelve visitors stepped into the simulation and tried disaster preparedness for themselves, experiencing the KingTide scenario explicitly developed based on their homeland, Rowy Beach. The fun part was when they realized how familiar those places in VR actually looked. The heat was relentless, but curiosity kept winning out over the temperature.
By the early evening hours, there were already signs that the weather problem ran deeper than anyone had expected. Driven by the heat, the local stretch of the Baltic coast had become saturated with cyanobacteria, and the coast guard banned swimming altogether. These are exactly the signals worth taking seriously: highly sensitive natural ecosystems are often the first to react, and their early warnings tend to forecast harder times ahead. When the water itself tells you to start preparing, it is wise to listen.
The most convincing argument of all
And then the heatwave made the case better than any slide deck could. As the team tried to head home, the extreme temperatures buckled Polish railway tracks and damaged a runway in Warsaw. Several colleagues were caught in serious delays; for one of us, simply getting home took more than 24 hours. A field event built to rehearse climate-driven disasters ended with the team living through a small one of its own – a sharp, unscripted reminder of exactly why B-prepared exists.
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