Andalucía to stage biggest emergency drill ever held in Spain: this is what you should know

Andalucía has become a pioneer in the development of large-scale practice drills for an emergency situations. According to the regional health minister Antonio Sanz, who is also responsible for emergency services, Andalucia will host the largest exercise in Spanish history in Cadiz on the 20th of November. The exercise will test response mechanisms to a natural catastrophe.

Response25 is a drill that will involve over 20,000 people including more than 19,000 members from the public, businesses and educational institutions.

The drill is designed to test the region’s capability in the event of a similar earthquake to the Lisbon quake of 1755, which struck southwest of Cape St Vincent with a magnitude 7.6. A tsunami warning would be issued along the Andalusian coastline if such an earthquake occurred.

The regional minister responsible for such emergencies pointed out that “we need to prepare ourselves for the worst-case scenario, although we hope we never have to experience it because it is not a matter of just getting lucky, it is work, foresight, planning, coordination and loyal cooperation between all institutions to provide the best service to the people of Andalucía”.

Antonio Sanz has stated that a tsunami warning will be sounded at 10:03am. The entire emergency response and coordinated system will then be tested. It will also test the response of Cadiz to a possible tsunami, as well the response times for emergency services and how the local population reacts to such dangers. The activation systems of mass alerts like ES-Alert as well as alarm-raising devices such as public addresses systems and bells will also be tested.

Other capabilities, including mechanisms to safeguard cultural assets and the Pan-European Mobile Emergency Application (Pemea) system will be tested. This standard allows any application that is developed in accordance with this standard, to communicate directly the emergency call number 112. The 112 chat system for hearing impaired people will also be tested.

The distance and time of vertical and horizontal evacuation, as well as the capacity and speed, will all be evaluated.

The regional minister further announced that Andalucía’s emergency plan for tsunami risk will be activated, noting that it was the first of its kind to be developed in Spain and one of the most comprehensive and unprecedented in Europe.

In this plan, the risk analysis examines different tsunamis and their impact on the Andalusian Coast. This work was also used as a basis for local planning to define evacuation routes and meeting places. This planning was done based on the worst possible tsunami scenarios in both the Atlantic and Mediterranean.

Plan includes mapping of hazards and the impact points where people will be swept off their feet, estimated arrival times for the tsunami, minute-by-minute estimates of its flow into the inland area, as well as the vulnerability of buildings. Sanz says that there are no other maps of building vulnerabilities with such a level of detail. In this respect, our work is innovative. The work has been viewed by several regions.

The mapping of all buildings located along the entire Andalusian coast, from Ayamonte in Huelva to Pulpí in Almeria, represents the first large-scale application, both nationally and internationally, of the relative vulnerability index of buildings for such disaster preparedness.