One more translation by yours truly for the A&N audience. Source [A]
Additional context: Hesse is a state located in the center of Germany. Frankfurt am Main and Wiesbaden (including the US military garrison there) are in Hesse.
Here are some photos courtesy of image search:
Fire station burned down
About the state of affairs in Hesse.
The SPIEGEL: In Hesse, a brand spanking new fire station with 8 fire department vehicles has completely burned down. And they are famously quite expensive. The Hessenschau speaks of damages totaling 20 to 24 million euros.
Why? Tagesschau: This January, it has been celebrated as "modern, innovative, and up to the latest standards", "the most modern fire station in the entire county. Everything you can think of is in there, but neither sprinklers nor a fire alarm system. A whole lot of building regulations, guaranteed to be climate friendly, women-inclusive and gender-compatible, but lacking such elementary things.
Well, you could argue, why would the fire department need a fire alarm system in their own building, they already know about it when it happens.
A fire alarm system is not mandated by law, says county fire marshal Lars Schäfer. It is at the discretion of the municipality how far they protect their critical infrastructure. "Having one is better than needing one, this is also true for fire alarm systems", Schäfer says. The current situation apparently will "encourage some deep thoughts on this".
However, whether a smoke alarm system and an earlier alert could have actually prevented the destruction of the fire station is unclear. Because the fire in Stadtallendorf seems to have spread especially quickly. "Within three minutes, the fire department was there", mayor Christian Somogyi (SPD) confirms to hr [Hessischer Rundfunk, public broadcasting for the state of Hesse].
The firemen quickly grabbed their protective gear from a part of the building that was still accessible and started fighting the fire. At times, the flames allegedly peaked 10 to 15 meters tall from the roof of the equipment hall. Almost half a dozen fire engines got incinerated there. According to county fire marshal Schäfer, nobody has been injured.
Responding to a hr inquiry, the Hesse ministry of the interior points out that it has yet to be determined if a fire alarm system could have prevented worse. Determining this "remains reserved to the further fire investigations". The decision of whether to install such a system must be made "on their own responsibility" at the location.
Among fire departments, a leader when it comes to preventive fire safety is the fire station in Bad Homburg which was constructed in 2007. There, a fire alarm system is installed in the vehicle depot, says Daniel Guischard, head of the fire department.
This, however, was a necessity because the staffrooms in Bad Homburg are located directly above the vehicle depot. This was not the case in the fire station in Stadtallendorf.
There, the recreation room and the technical room apparently weren't on top of each other, like with many fire stations, but next to each other in connected buildings, and the social housing building allegedly was able to be saved because a fire wall was in between.
It is said to be the worst thing that can happen to a fireman, when his own station is on fire. One of the firefighters put this into the right words with tears in his eyes: "We basically had to extinguish our own home" - this shows the deep connection of the volunteers to their fire station, says Schäfer.
Was this a professional fire department with attendance or a volunteer fire department in which nobody's there at night? On one hand, they are supposed to have been at the location in 3 minutes, on the other hand they're speaking of "volunteers".
Which begs the question of what caused the fire. Allegedly, a car caught fire. Arson? Short circuit? Or just an electric car?
Completely independent from the question of whether it would have been useful in this case, it begs the question of why we have so many fire regulations, to the point where you can't afford to build anything, but no fire alarm and no sprinkler systems are mandatory, even though things worth 20 million are standing around, and those things are highly dangerous, like cars with hot engines, catalytic converters, batteries, fuels, also chainsaws and such tools, and maybe electric cars too.
And if the depot genuinely developed such a full fire that the fire department wasn't able to do anything even if they were at the scene within 3 minutes, it begs the question of why you build something that can burn down that quickly in the first place.
I am well aware that, in case of emergency, the fire department needs easy access to the vehicles so they can get going quickly and avoid delays. But if I take into account what fire prevention rules exist even for data centers and IT buildings, no flammable materials are allowed to stand there, no cardboard boxes, the bins always have to be completely emptied, the cables all have to be self-extinguishing and such things, fire extinguishing systems, then I don't understand how there can be 8 (or one article claims it's a dozen) vehicles which - unlike in a museum - are being used and loaded daily, and put back in there "hot", without any safety measures such as fire walls between the vehicles or at least some kind of fire protection curtain so that a fire can't spread at least in such speed. And no sprinkler systems either.
Especially a fire department should be aware that vehicles can always catch fire, and that, for example, if you need to drive off road, you can catch stray leaves in the underbody that can catch fire on the hot catalytic converter. Or that there can be short circuits. Or the constant charging of the batteries in emergency vehicles can lead to fires. In data centers, you even have fire extinguishing systems. However, I don't know if they work in open halls because the extinguishing gas might just puff away without doing anything.
It would already have been good if they had slowed down the fire in a way that they could have driven out some of the vehicles or started extinguishing before everything was on fire.
Which puts a thought into my head:
Everybody is talking about self-driving vehicles. Are there self-rescuing vehicles already? Which automatically leave the building in case of a fire alert?
Which is probably not that smart, because it could lead to burning vehicles autonomously driving around and spreading the fire. And it would be quite a complex task, figuring out the order and destination when there's a fire.
But I can't get my head around how you can build a fire station equipment depot in such a way that the thing is in a full fire before the own fire department is on the scene.
Idea: Why don't you construct the roofs out of aluminum or light metal so that the roof melts during a fire and lets the smoke gases exit upwards so they don't spread in the hall? (Although: If you look at the pictures, the roof was gone already.)
On the other hand, you could of course argue that it is more economical to just live with the burn because damages worth 20 million are still cheaper than equipping all fire stations with fire prevention and fire alert systems. From IT security, I am aware that, sometimes, the best course of action can be to simply do nothing and take the damage. Maybe you just look at it too emotionally because it's been a fire station that burned down. But maybe, rationally, it could genuinely be the cheapest course of action to just say: So what? One burned down. Still cheaper than doing something about it.
Strangely, however, nobody asks how much CO2 and other gases "harmful to the climate" has been released by this, and how much is going to be caused by the reconstruction of the hall and the vehicles.
Update: Major fire at fire station apparently caused by batteries of emergency vehicle
A major fire at the fire station in Stadtallendorf, Hesse with damages around 20 million euros seems to have been caused by a technical defect. The investigations by the Hesse State Office of Criminal Investigation, supported by an expert, see no trace or arson, as the Gießen police reported on Thursday.
Accordingly, the fire started at an emergency vehicle of the fire department - in an area in which lithium ion batteries and an external power socket were located. They say the cause of the fire is assumed to be a technical defect. What has been destroyed was a new equipment hall of the fire station, the complex with a vehicle depot was just inaugurated in January.
From this, it's unclear whether it was a vehicle with an electronic drivetrain or an ordinary vehicle with an additional battery for some kind of application.
Additional context: Hesse is a state located in the center of Germany. Frankfurt am Main and Wiesbaden (including the US military garrison there) are in Hesse.
Here are some photos courtesy of image search:
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