Tartu And Estonian Rescue Board Test Automatic Public Shelter Door Opening During ILVES 2026

The City of Tartu and the Estonian Rescue Board tested a technical solution during the ILVES 2026 exercise to enable the automatic opening of public shelter doors in emergency situations.

“Large parts of Estonia's second-largest city were left without electricity, bringing traffic to a standstill and leaving a major hospital without power”

ERR

The test took place at the Tartu Vocational College (VOCO), where a remotely controlled external door system is already in place, and during the exercise a shelter door was successfully opened remotely from the Southern Rescue Center.

ERR

Urmas Klaas said, “We are continuously working to improve our preparedness for crises. In emergency situations, every minute counts,” adding that the testing is meant to ensure shelters can be quickly accessible “regardless of the time of day.”

Maarja-Liis Laprik, Shelter Advisor at the Rescue Board’s Safety Supervision Bureau, said wider implementation of remote door-opening systems would “significantly speed up the process of opening public shelters.”

A widespread power outage hit Tartu and South Estonia after a fault occurred at a substation in Tartu, taking a “large and critically important substation for the region” offline.

Elering said the short circuit occurred at 5:07 p.m., and by 5:11 p.m. it had begun restoration activities, restoring the entire power supply by 5:27 p.m. with the final reconnection completed.

UA.NEWS

Märt Allika, head of the control center at grid distributor Elering, said, “Elering restored the entire power supply by 5:27 p.m., when our final reconnection was completed.”

A hospital spokesperson said the outage affected the hospital’s main power supply system, but “The hospital's backup generators were activated,” and the electrical network was being restored through switching operations.

Elering later said at 6 p.m. Tuesday that the outage was caused by a fault during scheduled maintenance work, and it said its substations had been re-energized while it apologized to affected customers.

“Tartu Tests Automatic Opening of Public Shelters / The City of Tartu and the Estonian Rescue Board tested a technical solution during the ILVES 2026 exercise that would enable the automatic opening of public shelter doors in emergency situations”

| Tartu linn

Karit Kaasik, head of communications at the state Information System Authority (RIA), said the authority had “no indication to suggest the outage had been caused by a cyberattack.”

Local residents reported outages elsewhere in South Estonia, including Vastse-Kuuste in Põlva County, Nõo in Tartu County and the town of Elva.

As of Wednesday morning, an outages map updated in real time by Elektrilevi showed far more power cuts in southwestern Estonia—at over 400—than in the Tartu regions, where there were fewer than 100.