Finland is preparing for the worst. Is the rest of Europe ready? | DW News

0:00 – 4:08

Inside the cave: testing whether a city can survive underground

The strange image that opens the report is almost domestic: people playing cards during a drone threat and knitting wool socks during a flood. That is the point. Preparedness only works if fear does not completely take over daily life. Deep inside a mountain in central Finland, more than 2,000 people enter Luola, "the cave," one of Europe’s largest and most advanced underground shelters, to find out whether an entire community could actually function there during a crisis. The exercise, called Shelter 2026, brings together residents of Kuopio, emergency services, volunteers, and local authorities. Once the drill begins, the shelter is sealed off from the outside world for hours. The questions are practical, almost stubbornly ordinary: How much drinking water is needed? Does the temperature stay tolerable? Can people sleep? Can thousands handle the noise, stress, and confinement? One participant immediately puts a finger on the hardest part, saying it is "quite warm" and "a lot of noise," the kind of thing that would become exhausting if people had to stay for days. Volunteer Sonja Reinikainen helps teach people about safe drinking water, one of the basics that becomes critical fast in any emergency. She explains her motivation in plain civic terms: "I want to help my community to be safe." She also gives the scale that makes the shelter feel less like a bunker and more like emergency infrastructure for a whole city, saying the space can hold 70,000 people and that 72 hours is a normal period people could stay. What makes Finland unusual is that this system is not tucked away and forgotten. By law, larger residential and public buildings must include civil defense shelters. Kuopio also maintains large underground facilities, but in peacetime they are used constantly, for sports, play, and family activities. That is the unexpected angle in the report: readiness is sustained not by dramatic fear, but by everyday use. A shelter that doubles as a gym is easier to maintain, easier to inspect, and psychologically easier for citizens to see as part of normal life rather than a symbol of catastrophe.