At 10 a.m. Wednesday, offices, schools, hotels, clinics and government buildings across Costa Rica will empty into the street at the same time. Nothing will be wrong.It is the eighth national evacuation drill, and if you are in a building when it starts, someone will ask you to leave it. Follow them, take the stairs, and expect to be back at your desk or in your room within ten or fifteen minutes.
You do not need to have signed up to be swept along by it. If your hotel, your child’s school or your workplace registered, you are taking part whether or not anyone told you in advance.If you want to actually use the exercise rather than just stand outside for it, there are three steps.
Register at simulacro.cr, write or update an emergency plan for your household or business, then evacuate at 10 a.m. Wednesday and report that you did it through the Simulacro CR app. The middle step is the one that matters and the one most people skip. A plan means deciding now who collects the children, where everyone meets if the house is unsafe, which route you take if the usual road is blocked, and what you would grab on the way out.
Standing in a parking lot for ten minutes teaches you nothing if you have never answered those questions. This year’s exercise works differently from previous ones. Rather than everyone rehearsing the same scenario, you practice for the hazard that can actually reach where you are. Eight are on the list — earthquake, flood, landslide, volcanic eruption, tornado, hurricane, fire and tsunami.
The reason for this change is more common sense than anything else. Practicing a tsunami evacuation in Cartago is wasted effort, and practicing an earthquake drill on a beach where the real problem is the water arriving twenty minutes later teaches the wrong reflex. What you rehearse should match what is likely to happen where you live.
Unfortunately, turnout is running behind last year. The emergency commission counted 350,000 people signed up as of August 3, against more than 1.4 million who took part in 2025 — the highest participation on record. Keep in mind that registration and participation are not the same thing and sign-ups tend to surge in the final days, but the gap is wide.
Alejandro Picado, president of the Comisión Nacional de Emergencias, has pointed to emergencies elsewhere as the argument for taking it seriously, noting that Costa Rica deals with emergencies constantly and that knowing how to act is a civic responsibility rather than an optional extra.
Expect some public services to slow. The Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones will run the drill at its main offices, its warehouse in Desamparados, the Civil Registry archive in Los Yoses and all 32 regional offices, with more than a thousand people involved at the main site alone, including members of the public who happen to be mid-transaction. If you have paperwork to do Wednesday morning, do it early or do it Thursday.
The app is worth downloading before Wednesday rather than during it. It carries information about the exercise and is how you log your participation afterward, which is how the commission measures who actually took part. Monday’s magnitude 7.4 earthquake in Colombia, which killed more than a hundred people and closed three airports, is a reminder of why Costa Rica runs this exercise at all. Emergencies do not schedule themselves, and the ten minutes you spend outside on Wednesday are the cheapest preparation available.
