Poland has bomb shelters for 300,000 people but “places of shelter” for 48 million, finds inventory

An inventory carried out by the fire service has found that Poland, a country of 38 million people, only has space for 300,000 people in bomb shelters but can accommodate nearly 50 million in publicly available “hiding places” and “places of temporary shelter”, such as metro stations and tunnels.

The survey was ordered by the Polish government last October to assess the state of the country’s shelters in case “the darkest scenario” emerges from Russia’s war in neighbouring Ukraine. It followed concerns that Poland has very few useable bomb shelters.

As well as conducting the inventory, the fire service has now launched an online service (available at schrony.straz.gov.pl) that helps people find their nearest place of refuge in an emergency.

During the inventory, firefighters inspected almost 235,000 buildings, which were divided into three categories: shelters (schrony), hiding places (miejsca ukrycia), and places of temporary shelter (miejsca doraźnego schronienia).

According to the interior ministry, shelters are structurally enclosed, hermetic facilities allowing the protection of people, equipment and supplies from all sides. Hiding places are non-hermetic structures equipped with the simplest installations that ensure protection from certain sides.

Meanwhile, places of temporary refuge can be existing buildings of reinforced concrete or slab construction, located on the lowest floor, such as basements, garages, tunnels or metro stations.

“In Poland, there are more than 300,000 places in shelters, more than 1.1 million people can take shelter in hiding places, and nearly 47 million people in places of temporary shelter,” said the commander-in-chief of the fire service, Andrzej Bartkowiak, quoted by the Interia news service.

He noted that the figure does not include private premises. In calculating the number of places available, the fire service assumed that one person would occupy 1.5 square metres of space.

According to Bartkowiak, 13,000 firemen took part in the inventory, a task that has not been undertaken in Poland for as long as 70 years. The inventory was conducted by all of Poland’s fire stations from October 2022 to February this year, added deputy interior minister Maciej Wąsik.

Meanwhile, the new online service – initially only on a website but soon to also be an app – allowing people to find their newest shelter has been launched. It shows shelters marked in red, hiding places in blue, and places of temporary shelter in green.

“It will tell you not only how far away a place of refuge is, but also how quickly a unit of the fire service or a volunteer fire brigade can get there,” said Bartkowiak.

Main image credit: Ingolf/Flickr (under CC BY-SA 2.0)

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.