Friday, August 14th 2026 - 22:34 UTC
Peru held the year's second national multi-hazard drill on Friday, an exercise testing evacuation protocols and the response capacity of the public and the authorities to a possible magnitude 8.8 earthquake centered off the central coast of Lima and Callao.
At 3pm local time (20:00 GMT), sirens, horns and whistles sounded in public and private buildings, alongside alerts issued by the Peruvian Seismic Alert System and messages sent to mobile phones through SISMATE. Thousands of people left homes, workplaces and schools for safe areas. President Keiko Fujimori led the protocol evacuation in Lima's Plaza de Armas, accompanied by Prime Minister Luis Galarreta, the capital's mayor, Renzo Reggiardo, and the head of the National Civil Defense Institute, Luis Enrique Vásquez Guerrero.
The exercise ran in three stages: activation of alerts and movement to internal safe zones, evacuation along established routes to outdoor areas, and remaining under the guidance of emergency volunteers until the drill closed. Scenarios varied by region. On the coast, an earthquake followed by a tsunami was recreated; in the highlands, landslides and mudflows; and in the jungle, heavy rainfall and river flooding, as explained by the president of Peru's Geophysical Institute, Hernando Tavera.
