Malta’s Civil Protection Department will run a tsunami response simulation next Tuesday, the Department of Information has said.

The November 7 exercise will run from 8am to 12pm and is intended to help emergency crews evaluate local tsunami response plans, increase tsunami preparedness, and improve coordination throughout the community.

Similar exercises will also be held at the same time in other eastern and central Mediterranean countries, to identify weaknesses in local plans as well as coordination efforts between countries.

Aside from sounding public warning systems, emergency responders will evacuate and transport a group of schoolchildren and test out communication protocols.

As part of the exercise, the CPD will receive messages from an Italian coordination centre and communicate them to all emergency responders and stakeholders.

The Mediterranean-wide exercise has been dubbed NEAMWAVE23 and is being run under the auspices of IOC-UNESCO.

The CPD will coordinate it with the support of the University of Malta’s Department of Geosciences.

A number of tsunamis have affected the Mediterranean Sea over the past century, such as 1908 (Messina), 1956 (Greece), 2003 (Algeria) and 2017 (Greece), among others.

A similar exercise, NEAMWAVE21, was conducted in March 2021, while a full-scale evacuation exercise was conducted in Marsaxlokk as part of the Tsunami Last Mile project in November 2021.

In Malta, NEAMWAVE23 will also serve as a requirement for the CoastWAVE project, which is coordinated by the Department of Geosciences, University of Malta. CoastWAVE seeks to prepare a number of Mediterranean communities, including Marsaxlokk, to be certified as tsunami-ready.