The facade of the house is black with soot, the windows are cracked, the door has been temporarily boarded up. In front of it is a white van, squeezed between a demolished trailer and other cars. Debris and broken glass are lying around everywhere. Residents of the street in Fürth are shocked on Wednesday and still can not believe the devastation caused by the drunk driver of the semi-trailer the night before.
“It looks like after a war,” says Canan Bozdogan. The young woman was preparing dinner for her two children on Tuesday evening when she heard a loud bang. Looking out the kitchen window, she saw a truck roaring out of control down the street, crashing into parked cars and pushing them against walls in front of it. “Sparks flew, then everything burst into flames,” she says.
Three injured, more than 30 damaged cars, a house uninhabitable for the time being – is the police balance sheet at the end of the odyssey. Officers arrested the 50-year-old driver. He was due to appear before an investigating judge on Wednesday. It was a traffic accident, an act of terrorism can be ruled out, says the head of the Fürth police inspection, Bernd Wolf. Nevertheless, the day after there were still many unanswered questions: Why did the driver first race through a red light, collide with a car and then just continue down the road? Was he of unsound mind because of his drinking level? Or was there a technical defect? The police are investigating the man for assault, hit-and-run accident and negligent arson.
The fire brigade was hard at work putting out the burning cars left by the truck driver on his odyssey.
(Photo: professional fire brigade Fürth/dpa)
While an elderly man is already sweeping the shards off the sidewalk in front of his house on Wednesday morning and another neighbor is cleaning the windows, Ahmet Sugurlu is standing between the barriers and giving one interview after the other. The young man, who lives in a corner house, was one of the first helpers on the street. He first helped a disoriented man and then carried the truck driver away from the burning vehicles, he says. The young man is himself with the voluntary fire brigade in Fürth, but was not actually on duty that evening. It still seems unreal to him what happened on his doorstep. “You can hardly put into words how it looked here yesterday, like on a battlefield,” he says, pointing to a house where the shutters on many windows have melted in the great heat. It was lucky that the accident happened so late, says Sugurlu. “Usually the street is very busy.”
Fürth’s Mayor Thomas Jung (SPD) also speaks of a miracle that there were no deaths. The politician lives very close to the devastated street and jumped onto his bike, startled by the many sirens on Tuesday evening. “I saw a scenery that I actually only know from films about terrorist operations in major American cities,” he says. It is unbelievable what a single truck can do out of control. Jung therefore demands that consequences be drawn from the incident. “You really have to think about the dangers of trucks in urban residential areas. But that’s not something that the city of Fürth can decide. People in the ministries have to look at that.”
A special company wanted to move up with a crane on Wednesday to transport the heavy articulated lorry away. The emergency services were able to salvage some scrap cars during the night. However, the repair work on the street will take even longer: the police estimate the damage to be in the seven-figure range.