Finland’s massive bomb shelters draw world to Helsinki in quest for security

By Anne Kauranen and Vitalii Hnidyi

HELSINKI/BALAKLIIA, Ukraine, May 21 (Reuters) – Visiting mayors from Ukrainian cities took pictures inside an enormous cave carved in the bedrock below the Finnish capital, taking in the size and the possibilities of a space that can accommodate 6,000 people.

They are among around 800 foreign delegations who have visited Helsinki’s Merihaka civil shelter – the biggest of the country’s dual-use shelters and now a major shop window for Finnish companies looking to export to buyers concerned about the war in Ukraine and, increasingly, the conflict with Iran.

At 71,000 cubic metres, the shelter is roughly the volume of a seven-storey office building. It was built in 2003 and has sports pitches, a gym and a children’s playground 25 metres (80 ft) underground that are in use daily.

Should it be needed in an emergency, it can be converted with stores of bunk beds, water tanks and portable toilets within 72 hours.

GROWTH POTENTIAL

As well as being a testament to Finland’s painful history with neighbouring Russia during World War Two, building such shelters remains mandatory underneath residential and commercial buildings of a certain size.

With that requirement, Finnish companies are skilled in their construction and upkeep – such as fitting and maintaining radiation-proof doors, ventilation equipment and emergency power, as well as communications and sewerage networks.

Politicians, administrators and businesses from overseas, such as oil giant Saudi Aramco, have all sought information or visits, authorities and companies involved said.

Resilience Center Finland, an exports body established in March, said Finland’s security and defence exports stood at tens of billions of euros, with shelter sales amounting to some dozen million euros, with significant growth potential.

“Within two years we won’t need to compete fiercely with our peers over getting a gig. Rather, it will very soon be a question of capacity running out,” Ilkka Kivisaari, CEO of Finnish-Swiss-owned Verona Shelters Group, said, citing high demand in countries such as Poland and Germany and high interest from the Middle East.

INTEREST FROM GULF

Merihaka is among 48 big and 5,500 smaller shelters in Helsinki – among 50,500 constructed around the country, the legacy of a Soviet invasion attempt during World War Two.

At the entrance of another shelter in the city, which can house 3,800 people, Juha Simola, the CEO of Finnish Temet Group arrived straight from the Czech Republic after an export promotion trip led by Finland’s President Alexander Stubb.

He was showing shelter technology to visitors from Saudi Aramco, the world’s top oil exporter, and said he had also had interest from elsewhere in the Gulf during the war in Iran.

“There was a quite big hit in Abu Dhabi and I got a phone call from there that please come quickly,” Simola told Reuters, without giving further details.

He said his company was building a factory in the United Arab Emirates, which he said was planning to construct hundreds of shelters.

Temet, which has been in the business for 70 years, hopes to book 80% of its sales from exports over the coming years, Simola said.

While Temet and Verona are Finland’s biggest firms operating in shelter solutions, there are several smaller companies specialising in specific areas such as blast doors and communications.

SPORTS COMPLEX DREAM

Construction of a bomb shelter is mandatory underneath buildings exceeding 1,200 square metres (12,900 square feet), Pauliina Eskola, the Finnish interior ministry’s head of rescue department, said, stressing the need for regulation and quality.

The cost of a shelter below a new apartment block in Finland, paid for by the building’s owner, is between 1.5% and 4% of the total construction costs, Verona’s Kivisaari said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, his Polish counterpart Karol Nawrocki and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have all visited Merihaka in the past years.

“We came to gain the experience that’s available here, and we have a very big dream of building a sports complex like this,” Tetiana Grunska, deputy head of the Balakliia City Military Administration in Ukraine, said during the visit of the Mayors’ Club Ukraine, an organisation uniting over 600 current and former city mayors and territorial community heads.

POLAND ‘BUILDING FROM SCRATCH’

Poland is also looking to overhaul its shelters.

This year and last, Poland has allocated 5.8 billion zlotys ($1.59 billion) to the reconstruction of its collective defence facilities, its interior ministry said.

“We’re building from scratch. The situation in this respect was really dire in Poland – the last shelter was built in the mid‑1990s, so for 30 years nothing was done,” Robert Klonowski, deputy director in the Polish interior ministry, said.    

Ukraine and Poland have already introduced new legislation to make shelters mandatory in certain new buildings but Mayors’ Club board member Yuliya Chufistova said doing so had led to private investors cancelling projects in Ukraine.

“The price is higher when rules are more strict, so we need to find the balance,” she said.

AIR RAID ALERTS IN UKRAINE

Back near the Ukrainian frontline, in Grunska’s home town of Balakliia, the daily sirens in a war now in its fifth year show what would be the value of such dual use facilities.

One of the town’s few bomb shelters was built over the past year to double up as a school, allowing children to go back to classes several floors below ground, protected from Russia’s drone and missile attacks.

Air raid alerts sound 15 times a day or more, boxing coach Volodymyr Borshch said.

“I would like there to be an underground shelter for sports activities as well, where it would be possible not just to wait out the air raid alert, but to carry out a full training session while we wait,” he told Reuters.

($1 = 3.6511 zlotys)

(Reporting by Anne Kauranen in Helsinki, Vitalii Hnidyi in Balakliia, Ukraine; Barbara Erling in Warsaw, additional reporting by Dan Peleschuk in Kyiv; Editing by Alison Williams)