Clouds of smoke rise from an apartment building in Flensburg in the late afternoon. A firefighter uses a heavy jet of water to extinguish the burning roof from a turntable ladder. A fire in Flensburger Neustadt triggered a large-scale operation by the fire brigade and rescue workers in the evening. An adult and a child were killed in the fire. There were also nine injured.
Meanwhile, the police no longer have any information about missing residents of the apartment building. A police spokesman said in the evening. According to earlier information, 40 people were reported in the building. How many of them were in the building shortly before 5 p.m. when the fire broke out was just as unclear in the evening as the cause of the fire.
“When the fire brigade arrived, we found that an apartment building was on fire and several people were still in the building,” said fire brigade operations manager Marco Litzkow of the German Press Agency in Flensburg. “We have a total of eleven affected people, two deceased. It is a child and an adult.” The injured had already been taken to hospitals by ambulance. Several media had previously reported.
The fire had spread quickly. At the beginning of the mission, the situation was relatively confusing, Litzkow said. This was mainly due to the fact that there were both residents and onlookers on the streets.
Attic threatened to collapse
The work of the fire brigade was also made more difficult by a collapsing stairwell. “The squads that went to rescue people or fight fires had to stop the interior attack after a short time because the stairwell collapsed or was no longer accessible,” Litzkow told the Schleswig-Holstein magazine of the North German Broadcasting Corporation (NDR). In addition, according to the city, the top floor of the building threatened to collapse.
The fight against the fire was therefore only possible using ladders and turntable ladders. In the meantime, 13 ambulances were at the scene. The “Flensburger Tageblatt” reported: “Some were only able to save themselves and their children by jumping out of the windows.” Mattresses were stacked on top of each other under the windows in front of the building in the evening.
Residents should keep doors and windows closed
The media initially said that up to 25 people could have been injured by the fire. The regional control center north had asked residents in the Neustadt/Klues area to keep their doors and windows closed because of the major fire. They were also asked not to be in the immediate vicinity of the site on Harrisleer Straße so as not to hinder the work of the emergency services.
Flensburg’s Lord Mayor Fabian Geyer (independent) meanwhile sharply condemned the videos of the fire circulating on the Internet. “We have seen some of the images circulating on the internet,” he said near the scene of the fire. “You’re caught up in the feelings between incomprehension, anger, anger, speechlessness, that people (…) when others are fighting for their lives (…) enjoy filming it and putting it on the Internet.” It has nothing to do with how a civilized society should behave. It is intolerable.
The fire brigade commander was initially unable to say exactly where the fire broke out. “It was on fire from the first floor to the top when we arrived.” The house is definitely uninhabitable. The residents were cared for in the evening and emergency shelters were sought for them. Several emergency chaplains were also on fire. Nothing was initially known about the cause of the fire.
