The Army, Fire Service, Police and school groups as well as teams of volunteers will be participating in the Minoas 2024 earthquake exercise, covering the whole of Crete, which will be centred on Chania and Rethymnon on 22nd April, and on Heraklion and Lasithi on 23rd April. All those on the island will receive an earthquake warning via text message from the 112 emergency line. More extensive information will be published in the days before the exercise.

First day – earthquake off Souda
The scenario for the exercise assumes an undersea earthquake of 6.4 magnitude on the Richter scale taking place off Souda a little before 10.00 am on 22nd April. The tremor will chiefly cause rock falls and other geological phenomena inland. The exercise scenario will include areas with major influxes of people during the summer season such as the Samaria Gorge.

As well as rock falls in the nomos of Chania, there will be people needing to be rescued from large buildings in the centre of the city of Chania and in Souda. There will be evacuation exercises at all the school units in the nomos of Chania, while a temporary refuge with tents will be set up in the city at the Monachi Elia public sports ground (on the Leoforo Kazantzakis north of the Vamvakopoulo interchange with the VOAK).

Second day – earthquake off Heraklion
On the second day, 23rd April, the hypothetical earthquake will have an epicentre off the island of Dia (10 km offshore from the city of Heraklion), with a magnitude of 7.2 Richter. It will affect the nomos of Heraklion and that of Lasithi and there will also be a tsunami. Evacuation of habitations and other measures are planned. In Western Crete on the second day, the exercise will be limited to paper activities.

It is stated that the exercise will take place in accordance with plans agreed with the emergency and other services, and there is no cause for public alarm.
(Haniotika Nea)

The background
Planning for the Minoas 24 exercise has been under way for some time. It was first announced in October of last year by the minister for Climate Change and Civil Protection Vasilis Kikilias, who described it in a press release as “the most effective method of reinforcing the operational readiness and interoperability of all the bodies involved at a local, regional and central level.” On 15^th-16^th February this year a desk exercise for the services participating in Minoas 24 was held at the Cultural Conference Centre of Heraklion, led by the president of the Organisation for Antiseismic Planning and Protection (OASP), Professor Efthymios Lekkas, and attended by the Regional Governor of Crete Stavros Arnautakis.

Earthquakes in Greece
Greece is the most earthquake-prone country in Europe and the sixth such country in the world, a position which it owes to the convergence of the African and Eurasian lithospheric plates, the former of which is sinking slowly but steadily at a rate of about 4.5 cm per year below the latter. The result is an arc of seismic activity which runs from the Ionian island of Lefkada, down and along the southern edge of Crete and up again to Rhodes (the Hellenic Arc), before continuing down the Aegean coast of Turkey and then to the south of Cyprus.

Earthquakes in the Hellenic Arc can be of a magnitude up to 7.2 Richter and many of them have an epicentre offshore which limits their impact. However, tremors are also experienced all across the country, and Wikipedia lists 100 major earthquakes in Greece from the 5^th century BC up to the present day, most of them in the range 6 to 7 Richter, with a few much larger, which damaged buildings and in many cases caused loss of life.

It was only in the last century that governments began to introduce building codes for earthquake resistance. The first antiseismic regulations were introduced in 1959 and substantially improved in 1985. There then followed the New Hellenic Antiseismic Code (NHAC) of 1995 and the Hellenic Antiseismic Code (HAC) of 2000, which has remained in force with modifications up to the present.

The result is that Greece still has a large stock of buildings which were erected with no antiseismic measures at all, or partial ones which do not match modern specifications. Moreover, even those which were built in conformity with modern codes may have had their integrity impacted by structural alterations or poor maintenance.

The need for seismic inspections
The need for an organised programme of seismic inspections of the nation’s buildings has been evident for many years. An initiative to undertake inspections of public buildings was launched in 2002, but it did not proceed with any sense of urgency. However, events such as the magnitude 6.0 earthquake of 27^th September 2021 at Archalohori south-east of Heraklion, which with its numerous aftershocks killed one person and damaged over 5,000 buildings, and the much larger earthquakes of February 2023 in eastern Turkey and Syria which killed over 59,000 people and caused damage to an area the size of Germany, have brought the issue very much to the fore. In the case of Crete, the damaged buildings mostly predated seismic building codes, while in Turkey the devastation was held to have been largely caused by builders ignoring existing seismic codes, or buildings having been weakened by subsequent structural alterations.

As a result, in the summer of 2023 the Greek government passed a bill making the seismic inspection of all public buildings obligatory. A programme implementing this law has been under way for several months, run by the ministry for Climate Change and Civil Protection in collaboration with the OASP and the Technical Chamber of Greece.

In a press release on 6^th November last year the ministry for Climate Change and Civil Protection announced the creation of a database of public buildings on which the responsible services of the ministries for Climate Change and Civil Protection, Education Religious Affairs and Sports, Health, and Citizen Protection, in collaboration with the Central Union of Municipalities of Greece, would register all the buildings for which they had responsibility within two months. Simultaneously the Technical Chamber of Greece was to set up a register of interested civil engineers and to implement a programme of training them in the inspection and reporting process, in collaboration with the OASP.

With the registrations under way, in a statement to the Athenian-Macedonian News Agency, reported by the in.gr news site on 28^th January of this year, Efthymios Lekkas, Professor of Hazard, Disaster, and Crisis Management at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens and president of the OASP, said that the aim is to have completed the inspections of public buildings and their recording on an electronic platform by the end of the year.

“Up till now there was no database for those buildings,” he said. “By the end of the year we aim to have completed the whole process, which is important because for 20-22 years now the results have been negligible and now finally we are putting some order into the whole issue, having a picture which will lead to the upgrading of the country’s antiseismic protections.”

Initially, buildings will be registered on the database by their owners (municipalities, ministries, hospitals etc), while the results of the inspections will be uploaded once they have been completed, he said. Some 18,000 buildings have been registered to date, while so far 2,000 civil engineers have declared their participation in the scheme.

Any buildings which are found to have faults will be subjected to a second inspection, and if they are found to have major structural problems they will be closed. “Funding will be committed by central government so that next year, when the inspections have been completed, we can proceed with repairs to the buildings which have a problem,” the professor said. “The inspections will give us for the first time a picture from which we can formulate policies and upgrade the earthquake resistance of the country.” He added that the aim is for the programme to be later extended to private buildings.