After facing its own challenging situations in recent years, the municipality of Hesperange has invested in materials and staff to prepare for potential catastrophes.
Mayor Diane Adehm referred back to the floods in 2021, explaining that Hesperange has been preoccupied with the topic of the resilience in the years since.
The Ready Together Day was a pleasing opportunity to show residents the results of the council's investments and its plans for the future.
Adehm explained the floods were not the only motivation to organise the event, pointing to current affairs as well:
"It's an additional factor. I think there is lots of talk of the Ukraine war. As Ukraine is far away from us, but not actually that far, on the same continent, and who knows how it would go if Russia decided to attack a NATO member country, then we'd be embroiled in the war via NATO. So we'd just like to be prepared for any such situation."
Climate change was addressed with the help of a self-test at the event. Visitors could spend 30 minutes in a lorry attempting to complete normal everyday tasks at 50 degrees Celsius. Allowing people to experience it for themselves is an important part of the prevention strategy.
One has to experience the situation in order to want to effect change, explained Eva Macaigne, director of the Climat Sense Human Adaptation Institute:
"We are working on human adaptation, changing behaviours, and our cognitive studies show that the decision to change a behaviour is linked to an emotion. Spreading information is important, but in order to trigger a decision we need to make people feel emotions."
Walking at a normal pace, completing simple tasks – these are not so simple when temperates hit 50 degrees.
Although the experience only lasted 30 minutes, many of the participants were relieved when it was over. Some of the visitors commented after their lorry experience:
"It was pretty uncomfortable. It was only half an hour too, to have that throughout the whole day... above all it was 50 degrees in the shade, not even in the sun."
"It was impressive how things heated up so quickly, from the mobile phone, to metal spoons and other items. You can't touch them as easily when it's 50 degrees compared to normal. And movement was hard too. We walked on a treadmill set to a very slow pace, but even that was extremely tiring."
Cooking and having access to clean water is part of our everyday life, but what can we do when a catastrophe prevents these? The local scout troop conducted a demonstration to show people how to create a fire without a lighter.
Jérôme Grillo, group director at Don Bosco Howald explained:
"It's obviously easiest to use a lighter, but in an emergency they might not be available. So we have a whole range of stones, nowadays we can add iron to make it easier, wood works as well. But the technique needs to be known so one can prepare for an emergency."
There were also demonstrations on how to build a water filter from simple materials that many people already have in their homes, such as small stones, sand, or tea towels.
