In critical situations when lives are in danger and material losses occur, foreign language competence is often necessary. This is strikingly evident at accidents in border areas. Typically, emergency service personnel are competent only in their mother tongue. This project intended to widen the range of languages “cross border” with a strong orientation on training and re-training the vocational domains of the service. In less densely populated rural border areas, we find two patterns: bilingual skills are limited, the standard languages are closely related, and dialects mediating between them ensure understanding (cf. Dutch and German). If the neighbouring language is held in low esteem so is the motivation to learn the “other” language across the border. Communication and learning a foreign language will happen in the Lingua Franca, in our case in English. Co-operation of emergency services may be difficult for other reasons, too. Technical reasons such as incommensurate standards of the equipment, flow of communication, liaison between teams and their home base, rules for decision making, political and administrative decisions, financial reasons, matters of insurance, legal liability etc.The project partners developed vocational training materials for several languages, e-learning materials and exercises for training the trainers as well as matters of liaison and the coordination of information flow to bases and other teams.