emergencies
Fireball in a fire on the roof of a Berlin apartment building
Evacuated residents of the apartment building in Berlin on whose roof the fire broke out. photo
© Annette Riedl/dpa
The explosion can still be heard several kilometers away, debris is flying through the air: after the fire in an apartment building in the capital, the police are looking for clues.
The roof of an eight-storey house in Berlin caught fire on Wednesday evening. During the firefighting operation, a compressed gas tank on the house exploded and there was a fireball, said a fire department spokesman. There were no injuries. The fire on and in the scaffolded building near Chausseestrasse in the Mitte district was extinguished in the evening. 100 emergency services were on site. It is the job of the police to determine the cause of the fire.
The spokesman said there was reconstruction work going on at the house not far from the Dorotheenstadt cemetery. However, it is still inhabited. A resident told the dpa that there had been roof work on the building. It burned completely on the 300 square meter flat roof as well as on the eighth floor below, said the spokesman. The tenants on this floor had to leave their apartments.
In the explosion, flying debris would have spread to the neighboring roofs. “We’ve checked them now,” said the fire department spokesman. But above all, the emergency services on the ground were at risk. The police “cleared the sidewalks and streets of passers-by in an exemplary manner. Otherwise there would certainly have been injuries.”
The explosion could also be heard several kilometers away from the fire in the Mitte district – for example at Plötzensee. The fire brigade announced on Twitter shortly after the fire broke out: “We receive a lot of calls.”