Earlier this month, Lithuanian Minister of the Interior Agnė Bilotaitė, Director of the Fire and Rescue Department Saulius Greičius and the President of the Lithuanian Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Gintaras Grušas signed a cooperation agreement with a view to improving public education on civil safety. The minister noted that as one of the country’s largest communities, it is most important for Lithuanian Catholics to be included in the government’s campaign “We are a team – we have a plan”, especially for those who do not access news media. The campaign has already reached over 2 million citizens, and the number of visitors to the website www.lt72.lt has tripled.
The archbishop agreed that during these challenging times, communication is essential to reduce people’s fear and strengthen their spiritual resiliency. The Church has already invited Fire and Rescue representatives to special events where they set up information booths giving practical advice on emergency situations – what to do in emergencies, how to pack an emergency bag, and how to prepare a family plan.
This form of outreach will continue. Plans are also being made to create shelters in church buildings and install warning systems. Local municipalities have already identified 2,500 potential shelters which could harbour up to 800,000 citizens.
“We have never had shelters and hiding places in Lithuania,” Interior Minister Agnė Bilotaitė told the parliamentary National Security and Defence Committee on September 20. “After the war in Ukraine, we are building this thing from scratch. Our goal is to have a network of shelters in the future that would protect 40 percent of the population in the regions and 60 percent in big cities.” There are now ten churches that have been designated as shelters, five of them in the District of Klaipėda.
“Shelters are not designed to protect people from direct missile hits, they are there to prevent injury from fragments, shock waves, certainly many people are hit by shattered glass, these are extremely dangerous fragments,” said Saulius Greičius, director of the Fire and Rescue Department. According to him, many of the available shelters date back to the Cold War period, although most are now privately owned. “These shelters number 986, of which 350 are not suitable for use, in our assessment,” Greičius said. Only 214 of those shelters are adapted to withstand military strikes and survive if the upper building collapses.
The Catholic Church will also cooperate with the authorities to disseminate information about civil protection. Archbishop Gintaras Grušas said that priests will be talking about civil safety at services and churches will be posting information on their websites. Some priests are already educating their congregations about a wide range of things: smoke detectors, domestic violence, traffic safety.
