A serious accident ended a carnival parade in Kehl, Baden-Württemberg on Sunday: seven people were injured when a parade float caught fire. Six people were slightly injured and one man suffered serious injuries, the police in Offenburg said. Initially there was talk of five injured and one seriously injured person. The procession, which tens of thousands of people watched from the side of the road, was canceled. To save themselves from the flames, several people jumped from the moving truck onto the street.
According to the city of Kehl, the fire broke out in the interior of the car, which represented a ship. According to police, the moving truck was badly damaged. The city announced that the man who was seriously injured in the fire was flown to a clinic in a rescue helicopter.
The police said the cause of the fire was the deflagration of an engine on a trailer shortly after 3 p.m. This started the fire. According to police, the fire department extinguished the fire promptly.
Resident Jan Fritzsche describes what happened around 3 p.m.: “You heard a detonation, and then suddenly it started burning. Fire brigade, police, ambulance came straight away. People were first evacuated here and then it was “The fire was put out. It was pretty hot here.” The fire department asked people to leave quickly.
The Mayor of Kehlen, Wolfram Britz, later spoke to the German Press Agency about an unprecedented misfortune, but also praised the members of the group of fools. They “reacted very prudently and thus probably prevented something even worse.” He himself found out about the incident while he was standing in the stands on the market square. “I set off immediately. When I arrived at the scene of the accident, a good kilometer away, our fire department had already extinguished the fire and the injured were being treated by the rescue service and emergency doctor.”