Growth tensions between Ukraine and Russia leads the countries of the Old Continent to develop plans and prepare their populations for a a possible escalation of the war.
Last week, the Swedish government sent its citizens a manual on how to act in the event of a military attack, energy crisis or nuclear disaster. Today, it is the German executive which acts in a context of growing international threats.
According to the Ministry of the Interior, the Government is preparing a new emergency plan because currently the country only has It has 579 public places of civil protection or accommodation for 480,000 people.
During the government’s regular press conference, Interior spokesperson Mehmet Ata explained that this plan aims to develop an list of buildings but also private properties that can be used as shelter, which includes underground parking lots, basements, metro stations, among others.
It also offers a digital directory allowing citizens to find the nearest shelter through maps and reviews, as well as guides with recommendations for the construction of new basements, for example, in which citizens can protect “themselves”, complementing a global information campaign.
This work builds on the elements agreed last June by the federal and state interior ministers for a national shelter concept.
A joint working group is currently developing this plan, based on the emergency scenarios defined by the federal government in 2003 for the application of civil protection, he added. The work will still take time, Ata said, because it is a large and comprehensive project.
Ata admitted that on a national level there are currently an insufficient number of public shelters throughout the country, explaining that originally there were around 2,000 in Germany, which has around 84 million inhabitants, of which there remains “579 with 480,000 seats.”
“The spokesperson could not specify what percentage of the German population will be protected by the future civil protection plan.”
