Sweden’s largest cities do not have any evacuation plan

Today, it is the county administrative board and municipalities’ responsibility to carry out and plan any evacuations, or large-scale evacuations as it is also called, in the event of heightened preparedness. But for Sweden’s three largest cities – Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö – there are no such plans.

When asked by TT to the County Administrative Board in Stockholm if there is a plan for how Stockholm should be evacuated in the event of war, the answer is short and concise.

“No, there is no such plan at present,” writes Mathias Wahlsten, who is director of public works at the Stockholm County Administrative Board.

Escape and fencing

At the County Administrative Board in Västra Götaland, security director Lisa Nordahl says that they are waiting for a handbook from MSB that they will use to draw up plans for a large-scale evacuation.

When asked how long he thinks it would take to come up with a plan for evacuation during war, Björklund answers:

– There are some places that are more interesting if you think of a possible military strategy to attack the country. Should you focus hard on the most important municipalities or most important districts and make it work, it can be done relatively quickly if you put resources into it. Then a plan that is not practiced is not tested. But to do the planning, if you put all the people at the same table, does not take years, but I would say that it is months.

Mathias Wahlsten at the County Administrative Board in Stockholm writes in an email to TT “to make a full-scale plan for the evacuation of Stockholm County in case of war and danger of war is a complex and extremely extensive and resource-intensive work that has so far not been first on the list in the work. society needs to do as part of the reconstruction of civil defense.”