120 firefighters in a major fire in Grossarl
timeline
Shortly after 8 p.m., a house caught fire in Grossarl (Pongau) on Thursday evening and was fully engulfed in flames within a short time. The operation was extremely time-consuming and, above all, dangerous for the firefighters
At 8:07 p.m., the Großarl fire brigade was alerted to a fire in a residential building. Due to the large number of emergency calls that came in at the same time and already indicated a full fire, the operations manager had the alarm level 2 increased when they were deployed and shortly thereafter to alarm level 3. This also alerted the Hüttschlag and St. Johann (all Pongau) fire brigades.
The strong Föhn storm makes it difficult for the firefighters, says operations manager and deputy local fire brigade commander Stefan Diess: “Then there is a risk of smoke poisoning. So we didn’t do the initial extinguishing work, but only wrote with heavy breathing apparatus”. The wind then turned at night and blew the sparks onto the neighboring house. The water supply was ensured via three suction points and relay lines.
Neighboring houses threatened
The house could not be preserved. However, firefighters were able to prevent the flames from spreading to neighboring houses. However, the upper floor of a house threatens to collapse. The fire brigade had to remove the attic with a crane in order to completely fight the fire. The cause of the fire has not yet been clarified. Nobody got hurt.