You don’t notice that Alexander Müller-Gottwald is in the middle of saving a life. The firefighter sits on an office chair with headphones and a microphone, seven screens and a keyboard in front of him. He now enters everything into it that an excited caller who has dialed the emergency number 112 sends him. The father had fallen over, was lying motionless on the ground, needed help, an emergency doctor, a paramedic, quickly!
Müller-Gottwald calmly but firmly asks for the man’s name, address and condition, types everything into the computer, and while the emergency services are automatically sent into motion, he tells the caller on the phone what to do. He explains maneuvers, sets the rhythm for a cardiac pressure massage, and occasionally reassures: “The emergency services are right at the door.” Müller-Gottwald can actually see where the ambulance is on one screen, and he can read the resuscitation steps on another. As soon as the paramedics or emergency doctor arrive, their work is over.
This Friday, Alexander Müller-Gottwald only demonstrated resuscitation over the telephone as part of the annual financial press conference of the Munich professional fire department. He was able to remain relaxed while a colleague behind the window implemented the life-saving instructions on a dummy. In an emergency, a cardiac arrest is “a stressful situation for both the caller and the dispatcher,” explains trainer Thomas Klusak.
So that the dispatchers, as the firefighters are called behind the screens in the rescue control center, don’t forget anything in this life-threatening situation, there are checklists that guide them step by step through the procedure – different algorithms for adults, children and infants. In January alone, says Klusak, there were 180 telephone resuscitations, almost six per day.
Rescue operations will continue to do the most work for the Munich fire department in 2023. Wolfgang Schäuble, the head of the fire department, said around 68,000. There were also 17,000 technical assistance tasks, such as catching animals. A total of 97,187 missions were made, around 2,300 fewer than in 2022. They went out to fires 7,900 times; In 5,400 cases it was a false alarm.
Nevertheless, it is the large fires that Chief Fire Director Schäuble remembers most clearly. First, there was a church fire, which is generally rare. But on the night of June 11th, Father Timofei’s famous East-West Peace Church in the Olympic Park burned down. A month later, on July 10th, a roof truss fire in Bogenhausen kept the fire department busy for hours because of the improperly installed wood fiber composite insulation material. “It’s tricky,” says Schäuble about the recently used natural material: “If it starts to smolder, it’s complicated to prevent the fire from spreading.”
The third major operation in 2023 resulted from the snow chaos on the first weekend in December, which paralyzed the city. “What still worked was the fire brigade and rescue service,” sums up Schäuble. 800 missions were registered in a short period of time. In this context, he thanked the volunteer fire brigades, who always come to support the professional fire brigade during long-term operations. It currently has around 2,000 employees, 1,670 in traditional service, around 360 in the background, in administration, IT, and workshops.
This means that the Munich fire brigade is “very powerful,” praised Hanna Sammüller-Gradl, district administration officer and head of the Munich security authorities. In addition, Wolfgang Schäuble and his team are “leaders in Germany” when it comes to innovation. The professional fire department has paved new training paths so that interested parties no longer have to complete a craft training course before they can apply. In addition, the topic of diversity is being promoted in every respect in order to attract more people to a job in the fire department.
Even if the missions have recently become fewer, the tasks will not. In the summer, the fire brigade accompanies the European Football Championship games, and they have already rehearsed for this in 2023, for example the interaction in the care and transport of many injured people. To this end, the city council is supporting a drone project for use in large-scale operations, as Sammüller-Gradl reported. Before the European Football Championship, the fire department also wants to present new vehicles in a new design, Schäuble announced, without wanting to reveal too much: “The cars will remain red, but they will look more close to home.”